
Oass_i_ 
Book 



M 



I 









iUGUSTE COITE 



AND 



l^ 



POSITIVISM 



BY JOHN STUART MILL 




PHILADELPHIA : 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 
1866. 









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Af'SfrQ 




<** RECEDED. V <i 

AUGUSTE COM:r 



POSITIVISM, 



PART I. 

THE COTJRS DE PHILOSOPHIE POSITIVE. 

For some time nmcli has been said, in England 
and on the Continent, concerning "Positivism" 
and " the Positive Philosophy." Those phrases, 
which during the life of the eminent thinker who 
introduced them had made their way into no writ- 
ings or discussions but those of his very few direct 
disciples, have emerged from the depths and mani- 
fested themselves on the surface of the philosophy 
of the age. It is not very widely known what they 
represent, but it is understood that they represent 
something. They are symbols of a recognised mode 
of thought, and one of sufficient importance to in- 
duce almost all who now discuss the great problems 
of philosophy, or survey from any elevated point 
of view the opinions of the age, to take what is 
termed the Positivist view of things into serious 
i 



2 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

consideration, and define their own position, more 
or less friendly or hostile, in regard to it; Indeed, 
though the mode of thought expressed by the terms 
Positive and Positivism is widely spread, the words 
themselves are, as usual, better known through the 
enemies of that mode of thinking than through its 
friends ; and more than one thinker who never 
called himself or his opinions by those appellations, 
and carefully guarded himself against being con- 
founded with those who did, finds himself, some- 
times to his displeasure, though generally by a 
tolerably correct instinct, classed with Positivists, 
and assailed as a Positivist. This change in the 
bearings of philosophic opinion commenced in 
England earlier than in Prance, where a philo- 
sophy of a contrary kind had been more widely 
cultivated, and had taken a firmer hold on the 
speculative minds of a generation formed by 
Boy er- Collar d, Cousin, Jouffroy, and their com- 
peers. The great treatise of M. Comte was scarcely 
mentioned in Prench literature or criticism, when 
it was already working powerfully on the minds of 
many British students and thinkers. But, agree- 
ably to the usual course of things in Prance, the 
new tendency, when it set in, set in more strongly. 
Those who call themselves Positivists are indeed 
not numerous ; but all Prench writers who adhere 
to the common philosophy, now feel it necessary to 
begin by fortifying their position against " the 
Positivist school." And the mode of thinking 
thus designated is already manifesting its import- 
ance by one of the most unequivocal signs, the 



ATJGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 6 

appearance of thinkers who attempt a compromise 
or juste milieu between it and its opposite. The 
acute critic and metaphysician M. Taine, and the 
distinguished chemist M. Berthelot, are the authors 
of the two most conspicuous of these attempts. 

*The time, therefore, seems to have come, when 
every philosophic thinker not only ought to form, 
but may usefully express, a judgment respecting 
this intellectual movement ; endeavouring to under- 
stand what it is, whether it is essentially a whole- 
some movement, and if so, what is to be accepted 
and what rejected of the direction given to it by its 
most important movers. There cannot be a more 
appropriate mode of discussing these points than in 
the form of a critical examination of the philosophy 
of August e Comte ; for which the appearance of a 
new edition of his fundamental treatise, with a 
preface by the most eminent, in every point of 
view, of his professed disciples, M. Littre, affords a 
good opportunity. The name of M. Comte is more 
identified than any other with this mode of thought. 
He is the first who has attempted its complete sys- 
tematization, and the scientific extension of it to all 
objects of human knowledge. And in doing this 
he has displayed a quantity and quality of mental 
power, and achieved an amount of success, which 
have not only won but retained the high admira- 
tion of thinkers as radically and strenuously op- 
posed as it is possible to be, to nearly the whole of 
his later tendencies, and to many of his earlier 
opinions. It would have been a mistake had such 

thinkers busied themselves in the first instance 

1 * 



4 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

with drawing attention to what they regarded as 
errors in his great work. Until it had taken the 
place in the world of thought which belonged to it, 
the important matter was not to criticise it, but to 
help in making it known. To have put those who 
neither knew nor were capable of appreciating 
the greatness of the book, in possession of its vul- 
nerable points, would have indefinitely retarded 
its progress to a just estimation, and was not need- 
ful for guarding against any serious inconvenience. 
While a writer has few readers, and no influence 
except on independent thinkers, the only thing 
worth considering in him is what he can teach us : 
if there be anything in which he is less wise than 
we are already, it may be left unnoticed until the 
time comes when his errors can do harm. But the 
high place which M. Comte has now assumed 
among European thinkers, and the increasing in- 
fluence of his principal work, while they make it a 
more hopeful task than before to impress and en- 
force the strong points of his philosophy, have ren- 
dered it, for the first time, not inopportune to dis- 
cuss his mistakes. Whatever errors he may have 
fallen into are now in a position to be injurious, 
while the free exposure of them can no longer 
be so. 

We propose, then, to pass in review the main 
principles of M. Comte's philosophy ; commencing 
with the great treatise by which, in this country, 
he is chiefly known, and postponing consideration of 
the writings of the last ten years of his life, except 
for the occasional illustration of detached points. 



AUGTTSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 5 

When we extend our examination to these later 
productions, we shall have, in the main, to reverse 
our judgment. Instead of recognizing, as in the 
Cours de Philosophic Positive, an essentially sound 
view of philosophy, with a few capital errors, it is 
in their general character that we deem the sub- 
sequent speculations false and misleading, while 
in the midst of this wrong general tendency, we 
find a crowd of valuable thoughts, and suggestions 
of thought, in detail. Eor the present we put out 
of the question this signal anomaly in M. Comte's 
intellectual career. We shall consider only the 
principal gift which he has left to the world, his 
clear, full, and comprehensive exposition, and in 
part creation, of what he terms the Positive Philo- 
sophy : endeavouring to sever what in our estima- 
tion is true, from the much less which is erroneous, 
in that philosophy as he conceived it, and distin- 
guishing, as we proceed, the part which is specially 
his, from that which belongs to the philosophy of 
the age, and is the common inheritance of thinkers. 
This last discrimination has been partially made in 
a late pamphlet, by Mr Herbert Spencer, in vin- 
dication of his own independence of thought : but 
this does not diminish the utility of doing it, with 
a less limited purpose, here ; especially as Mr 
Spencer rejects nearly all which properly belongs 
to M. Comte, and in his abridged mode of state- 
ment does scanty justice to what he rejects. The 
separation is not difficult, even on the direct evi- 
dence given by M. Comte himself, who, far from 
claiming any originality not really belonging to 



6 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

him, was eager to connect his own most original 
thoughts with every germ of anything similar 
which he oh served in previous thinkers. 

The fundamental doctrine of a true philosophy, 
according to M. Comte, and the character hy which 
he defines Positive Philosophy, is the following : 
— We have no knowledge of anything hut Phseno- 
mena; and our knowledge of phenomena is relative, 
not absolute. We know not the essence, nor the 
real mode of production, of any fact, but only its 
relations to other facts in the way of succession or 
of similitude. These relations are constant ; that 
is, always the same in the same circumstances. 
The constant resemblances which link phenomena 
together, and the constant sequences which unite 
them as antecedent and consequent, are termed 
their laws. The laws of phsenomena are all we 
know respecting them. Their essential nature, 
and their ultimate causes, either efficient or final, 
are unknown and inscrutable to us. 

M. Comte claims no originality for this con- 
ception of human knowledge. He avows that it 
has been virtually acted on from the earliest period 
by all who have made any real contribution to 
science, and became distinctly present to the minds 
of speculative men from the time of Bacon, Des- 
cartes, and Galileo, whom he regards as collect- 
ively the founders of the Positive Philosophy. 
A& he says, the knowledge which mankind, even 
in the earliest ages, chiefly pursued, being that 
which they most needed, was /breknowledge : " sa- 
voir, pour prevoir." When they sought for the 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 7 

cause, it was mainly in order to control the effect, 
or if it was uncontrollable, to foreknow and adapt 
their conduct to it. Now, all foresight of phseno- 
mena, and power over them, depend on knowledge 
of their sequences, and not upon any notion we 
may have formed respecting their origin or inmost 
nature. We foresee a fact or event by means of 
facts which are signs of it, because experience has 
shown them to be its antecedents. We bring about 
any fact, other than our own muscular contractions, 
by means of some fact which experience has shown 
to be followed by it. All foresight, therefore, and 
all intelligent action, have only been possible in 
proportion as men have successfully attempted to 
ascertain the successions of phsenomena. Neither 
foreknowledge, nor the knowledge which is practi- 
cal power, can be acquired by any other means. 

The conviction, however, that knowledge of 
the successions and co-existences of phsenomena is 
the sole knowledge accessible to us, could not be 
arrived at in a very early stage of the progress of 
thought. Men have not even now left off hoping 
for other knowledge, nor believing that they have 
attained it ; and that, when attained, it is, in some 
undefinable manner, greatly more precious than 
mere knowledge of sequences and co-existences. 
The true doctrine was not seen in its full clearness 
even by Bacon, though it is the result to which all 
his speculations tend : still less by Descartes. It 
was, however, correctly apprehended by Newton.* 

* See the Chapter on Efficient Causes in Eeid's " Essays on the 
Active Powers," which is avowedly grounded on Newton's ideas. 



8 ATJG-TTSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

But it was probably first conceived in its entire 
generality by Hume, who carries it a step further 
than Comte, maintaining not merely that the only 
causes of phenomena which can be known to us 
are other phenomena, their invariable antecedents, 
but that there is no other kind of causes : cause, 
as he interprets it, means the invariable antece- 
dent. This is the only part of Hume's doctrine 
which was contested by his great adversary, Kant ; 
who, maintaining as strenuously as Comte that we 
know nothing of Things in themselves, of Nou- 
mena, of real Substances and real Causes, yet 
peremptorily asserted their existence. But nei- 
ther does Comte question this : on the contrary, 
all his language implies it. Among the direct 
successors of Hume, the writer who has best stated 
and defended Comte' s fundamental doctrine is Br 
Thomas Brown. The doctrine and spirit of Brown's 
philosophy are entirely Positivist, and no better 
introduction to Positivism than the early part of 
his Lectures has yet been produced. Of living 
thinkers we do not speak; but the same great 
truth formed the groundwork of all the speculative 
philosophy of Bentham, and pre-eminently of James 
Mill : and Sir William Hamilton's famous doctrine 
of the Belativity of human knowledge has guided 
many to it, though we cannot credit Sir "William 
Hamilton himself with having understood the 
principle, or been willing to assent to it if he had. 

The foundation of M. Comte' s philosophy is 
thus in no way peculiar to him, but the general 
property of the age, however far as yet from being 
universally accepted even by thoughtful minds. 



\ 



ATTGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 9 

The philosophy called Positive is not a recent in- 
vention of M. Comte, but a simple adherence to 
the traditions of all the great scientific minds 
whose discoveries have made the human race what 
it is. M. Comte has never presented it in any 
other light. But he has made the doctrine his 
own by his manner of treating it. To know rightly 
what a thing is, we require to know, with equal 
distinctness, what it is not. To enter into the real 
character of any mode of thought, we must under- 
stand what other modes of thought compete with 
it. M. Comte has taken care that we should do 
so. The modes of philosophizing which, according 
to him, dispute ascendancy with the Positive, are 
two in number, both of them anterior to it in date ; 
the Theological, and the Metaphysical. 

We use the words Theological, Metaphysical, 
and Positive, because they are chosen by M. Comte 
as a vehicle for M. Comte's ideas. Any philoso- 
pher whose thoughts another person undertakes to 
set forth, has a right to require that it should be 
done by means of his own nomenclature. They 
are not, however, the terms we should ourselves 
choose. In all languages, but especially in Eng- 
lish, they excite ideas other than those intended. 
The words Positive and Positivism, in the meaning 
assigned to them, are ill fitted to take root in 
English soil; while Metaphysical suggests, and 
suggested even to M. Comte, much that in no 
way deserves to be included in his denunciation. 
The term Theological is less wide of the mark, 
though the use of it as a term of condemnation 
implies, as we shall see, a greater reach of nega- 



10 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

tion than need be included in the Positive creed. 
Instead of the Theological we should prefer to 
speak of the Personal, or Yolitional explanation of 
nature ; instead of Metaphysical, the Ahstractional 
or Ontological : and the meaning of Positive would 
be less ambiguously expressed in the objective as- 
pect by Phsenomenal, in the subjective by Experi- 
ential. But M. Comte's opinions are best stated 
in his own phraseology ; several of them, indeed, 
can scarcely be presented in some of their bear- 
ings without it. 

The Theological, which is the original and 
spontaneous form of thought, regards the facts 
of the universe as governed not by invariable 
laws of sequence, but by single and direct volitions 
of beings, real or imaginary, possessed of life and 
intelligence. In the infantile state of reason and 
experience, individual objects are looked upon as 
animated. The next step is the conception of 
invisible beings, each of whom superintends and 
governs an entire class of objects or events. The 
last merges this multitude of divinities in a single 
God^ho made the whole universe in the begin- 
ning, and guides and carries on its phenomena 
by his continued action, or, as others think, only 
modifies them from time to time by special inter- 
ferences. 

The mode of thought which M. Comte terms 
Metaphysical, accounts for phenomena by ascrib- 
ing them, not to volitions either sublunary or 
celestial, but to realized abstractions. In this 
stage it is no longer a god that causes and directs 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 11 

each of the various agencies of nature : it is a 
power, or a force, or an occult quality, considered 
as real existences, inherent in but distinct from 
the concrete bodies in which they reside, and 
which they in a manner animate. Instead of 
Dryads presiding over trees, producing and regu- 
lating their phenomena, every plant or animal has 
now a Vegetative Soul, the 9gs7rnx?j \J/u;^ of Aris- 
totle. At a later period the Vegetative Soul has 
become a Plastic Force, and still later, a Vital 
Principle. Objects now do all that they do because 
it is their Essence to do so, or by reason of an 
inherent Virtue. Phenomena are accounted for 
by supposed tendencies and propensities of the 
abstraction Nature ; which, though regarded as 
impersonal, is figured as acting on a sort of 
motives, and in a manner more or less analogous 
to that of conscious beings. Aristotle affirms a 
tendency of nature towards the best, which helps 
him to a theory of many natural phenomena. The 
rise of water in a pump is attributed to Nature's 
horror of a vacuum. The fall of heavy bodies, and 
the ascent of flame and smoke, are construed as 
attempts of each to get to its natural place. Many 
important consequences are deduced from the doc- 
trine that Nature has no breaks (non habet 
saltum). In medicine the curative force (vis 
medicatrix) of Nature furnishes the explanation 
of the reparative processes which modern physiolo- 
gists refer each to its own particular agencies and 
laws. 

Examples are not necessary to prove to those 



12 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

who are acquainted with the past phases of human 
thought, how great a place hoth the theological 
and the metaphysical interpretations of phenomena 
have historically occupied, as well in the specula- 
tions of thinkers as in the familiar conceptions 
of the multitude. Many had perceived before 
M. Comte that neither of these modes of explan- 
ation was final : the warfare against hoth of them 
could scarcely be carried on more vigorously than 
it already was, early in the seventeenth century, 
by Hobbes. Nor is it unknown to any one who 
has followed the history of the various physical 
sciences, that the positive explanation of facts has 
substituted itself, step by step, for the theological 
and metaphysical, as the progress of inquiry 
brought to light an increasing number of the 
invariable laws of phaenomena. In these respects 
M. Comte has not originated anything, but has 
taken his place in a fight long since engaged, and 
^L. on the side already in the main victorious. The 
generalization which belongs to himself, and in 
which he had not, to the best of our knowledge, 
been at all anticipated, is, that every distinct class 
of human conceptions passes through all these 
stages, beginning with the theological, and pro- 
ceeding through the metaphysical to the positive : 
the metaphysical being a mere state of transition, 
but an indispensable one, from the theological 
mode of thought to the positive, which is destined 
finally to prevail, by the universal recognition 
that all phaenomena without exception are governed 
by invariable laws, with which no volitions, either 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 13 

natural or supernatural, interfere. This general 
theorem is completed by the addition, that the 
theological mode of thought has three stages, 
Eetichism, Polytheism, and Monotheism : the suc- 
cessive transitions being prepared, and indeed 
caused, by the gradual uprising of the two rival 
modes of thought, the metaphysical and the posi- 
tive, and in their turn preparing the way for the 
ascendancy of these ; first and temporarily of the 
metaphysical, finally of the positive. 

This generalization is the most fundamental 
of the doctrines which originated with M. Comte ; 
and the survey of history, which occupies the two 
largest volumes of the six composing his work, 
is a continuous exemplification and verification 
of the law. How well it accords with the facts, 
and how vast a number of the greater historical 
phaenomena it explains, is known only to those 
who have studied its exposition, where alone it 
can be found — in these most striking and instruct- 
ive volumes. As this theory is the key to M. 
Comte' s other generalizations, all of which are 
more or less dependent on it ; as it forms the 
backbone, if we may so speak, of his philosophy, 
and, unless it be true, he has accomplished little ; 
we cannot better employ part of our space than in 
clearing it from misconception, and giving the 
explanations necessary to remove the obstacles 
which prevent many competent persons from 
assenting to it. 

It is proper to begin by relieving the doctrine 
from a religious prejudice. The doctrine condemns 



14 ATJGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

all theological explanations, and replaces them, or 
thinks them destined to be replaced, by theories 
which take no account of anything but an ascer- 
tained order of phenomena. It is inferred that 
if this change were completely accomplished, man- 
kind would cease to refer the constitution of 
Nature to an intelligent will, or to believe at all in 
a Creator and supreme Governor of the world. 
This supposition is the more natural, as M. Comte 
was avowedly of that opinion. He indeed dis- 
claimed, with some acrimony, dogmatic atheism, 
and even says (in a later work, but the earliest 
contains nothing at variance with it) that the 
hypothesis of design has much greater verisimili- 
tude than that of a blind mechanism. But con- 
jecture, founded on analogy, did not seem to him 
a basis to rest a theory on, in a mature state of 
human intelligence. He deemed all real know- 
ledge of a commencement inaccessible to us, and 
the inquiry into it an overpassing of the essential 
limits of our mental faculties. To this point, 
however, those who accept his theory of the pro- 
gressive stages of opinion are not obliged to follow 
him. The Positive mode of thought is not neces- 
sarily a denial of the supernatural ; it merely 
throws back that question to the origin of all 
things. If the universe had a beginning, its 
beginning, by the very conditions of the case, was 
supernatural ; the laws of nature cannot account 
for their own origin. The Positive philosopher is 
free to form his opinion on the subject, according 
to the weight he attaches to the analogies which 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 



15 



are called marks of design, and to the general 
traditions of the human race. The value of these 
evidences is indeed a question for Positive philoso- 
phy, but it is not one upon which Positive philoso- 
phers must necessarily be agreed. It is one of M. 
Comte's mistakes that he never allows of open 
questions. Positive Philosophy maintains that 
within the existing order of the universe, or rather 
of the part of it known to us, the direct determin- 
ing cause of every phenomenon is not supernatural 
but natural. It is compatible with this to believe, 
that the universe was created, and even that it is 
continuously governed, by an Intelligence, pro- 
vided we admit that the intelligent Governor 
adheres to fixed laws, which are only modified or 
counteracted by other laws of the same dispensa- 
tion, and are never either capriciously or provi- 
dentially departed from. Whoever regards all 
events as parts of a constant order, each one being 
the invariable consequent of some antecedent 
condition, or combination of conditions, accepts 
fully the Positive mode of thought : whether he 
acknowledges or not an universal antecedent on 
which the whole system of nature was originally 
consequent, and whether that universal antecedent 
is conceived as an Intelligence or not. 

There is a corresponding misconception to be 
corrected respecting the Metaphysical mode of 
thought. In repudiating metaphysics, M. Comte 
did not interdict himself from analysing or criti- 
cising any of the abstract conceptions of the mind. 
He was not ignorant (though he sometimes seemed 



16 ATJGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

to forget) that such, analysis and criticism are a 
necessary part of the scientific process, and ac- 
company the scientific mind in all its operations. 
What he condemned was the habit of conceiving 
these mental abstractions as real entities, which 
could exert power, produce phenomena, and the 
enunciation of which could be regarded as a theory 
or explanation of facts. Men of the present day 
with difficulty believe that so absurd a notion was 
ever really entertained, so repugnant is it to the 
mental habits formed by long and assiduous culti- 
vation of the positive sciences. But those sciences, 
however widely cultivated, have never formed the 
basis of intellectual education in any society. It is 
with philosophy as with religion : men marvel at 
the absurdity of other people's tenets, while ex- 
actly parallel absurdities remain in their own, and 
the same man is unaffectedly astonished that words 
can be mistaken for things, who is treating other 
words as if they were things every time he opens 
his mouth to discuss. No one, unless entirely 
ignorant of the history of thought, will deny that 
the mistaking of abstractions for realities pervaded 
speculation all through antiquity and the middle 
ages. The mistake was generalized and systema- 
tized in the famous Ideas of Plato. The Aristo- 
telians carried it on. Essences, quiddities, virtues 
residing in things, were accepted as a bond fide ex- 
planation of phenomena. Not only abstract 
qualities, but the concrete names of genera and 
species, were mistaken for objective existences. It 
was believed that there were General Substances 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 17 

corresponding to all the familiar classes of concrete 
things : a substance Man, a substance Tree, a 
substance Animal, which, and not the individual 
objects so called, were directly denoted by 
those names. The real existence of Universal Sub- 
stances was the question at issue in the famous 
controversy of the later middle ages between No- 
minalism and Realism, which is one of the turn- 
ing points in the history of thought, being its first 
struggle to emancipate itself from the dominion of 
verbal abstractions. The Realists were the stronger 
party, but though the Nominalists for a time suc- 
cumbed, the doctrine they rebelled against fell, 
after a short interval, with the rest of the schol- 
astic philosophy. But while universal substances 
and substantial forms, being the grossest kind of 
realized abstractions, were the soonest discarded, 
Essences, Virtues, and Occult Qualities long sur- 
vived them, and were first completely extruded 
from real existence by the Cartesians. In Des- 
- cartes' conception of science, all physical phseno- 
mena were to be explained by matter and motion, 
that is, not by abstractions but by invariable 
physical laws : though his own explanations were 
many of them hypothetical, and turned out to be 
erroneous. Long after him, however, fictitious 
entities (as they are happily termed by Bentham) 
continued to be imagined as means of accounting 
for the more mysterious phsenomena ; above all 
in physiology, where, under great varieties of 
phrase, mysterious forces and principles were the 
explanation, or substitute for explanation, of the 



18 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

phenomena of organized beings. To modern 
philosophers these fictions are merely the abstract 
names of the classes of phenomena which corre- 
spond to them; and it is one of the puzzles of 
philosophy, how mankind, after inventing a set of 
mere names to keep together certain combinations 
of ideas or images, could have so far forgotten 
their own act as to invest these creations of their 
will with objective reality, and mistake the name 
of a phenomenon for its efficient cause. What 
was a mystery from the purely dogmatic point of 
view, is cleared up by the historical. These abstract 
words are indeed now mere names of phenomena, 
but were not so in their origin. To us they denote 
only the phenomena, because we have ceased to 
believe in what else they once designated ; and the 
employment of them in explanation is to us 
evidently, as M. Comte says, the naif reproduction 
of the phenomenon as the reason for itself : but it 
was not so in the beginning. The metaphysical 
point of view was not a perversion of the positive, 
but a transformation of the theological. The 
human mind, in framing a class of objects, did 
not set out from the notion of a name, but from 
that of a divinity. The realization of abstractions 
was not the embodiment of a word, but the gra- 
dual disembodiment of a Fetish. 

The primitive tendency or instinct of mankind 
is to assimilate all the agencies which they per- 
ceive in Nature, to the only one of which they are 
directly conscious, their own voluntary activity. 
Every object which seems to originate power, that 



AUGTTSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 19 

is, to act without being first visibly acted upon, to 
communicate motion without having first received 
it, they suppose to possess life, consciousness, will. 
This first rude conception of nature can scarcely, 
however, have been at any time extended to all 
phenomena. The simplest observation, without 
which the preservation of life would have been 
impossible, must have pointed out many uniform- 
ities in nature, many objects which, under given 
circumstances, acted exactly like one another : and 
whenever this was observed, men's natural and 
untutored faculties led them to form the similar 
objects into a class, and to think of them together : 
of which it was a natural consequence to refer 
effects, which were exactly alike, to a single will, 
rather than to a number of wills precisely accord- 
ant. But this single will could not be the will of 
the objects themselves, since they were many : it 
must be the will of an invisible being, apart from 
the objects, and ruling them from an unknown 
distance. This is Polytheism. "We are not aware 
that in any tribe of savages or negroes who have 
been observed, Eetichism has been found totally 
unmixed with Polytheism, and it is probable that 
the two coexisted from the earliest period at which 
the human mind was capable of forming objects 
into classes. Eetichism proper gradually becomes 
limited to objects possessing a marked individuality 
A particular mountain or river is worshipped bodily 
(as it is even now by the Hindoos and the South Sea 
Islanders) as a divinity in itself, not the mere re- 
sidence of one, long after invisible gods have been 

2 * 



20 AUGTTSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

imagined as rulers of all the great classes of pheno- 
mena, even intellectual and moral, as war, love, 
wisdom, beauty, &c. The worship of the eartli 
(Tellus or Pales) and of the various heavenly 
bodies, was prolonged into the heart of Polythe- 
ism. Every scholar knows, though litterateurs and 
men of the world do not, that in the full vigour 
of the Greek religion, the Sun and Moon, not 
a god and goddess thereof, were sacrificed to as 
deities — older deities than Zeus and his descend- 
ants, belonging to the earlier dynasty of the 
Titans (which was the mythical version of the fact 
that their worship was older), and these deities had 
a distinct set of fables or legends connected with 
them. The father of Phaethon and the lover of 
Endymion were not Apollo and Diana, whose iden- 
tification with the Sungod and the Moongoddess 
was a late invention. Astrolatry, which, as M. 
Comte observes, is the last form of Eetichism, sur- 
vived the other forms, partly because its objects, 
being inaccessible, were not so soon discovered to 
be in themselves inanimate, and partly because of 
the persistent spontaneousness of their apparent 
motions. 

As far as Eetichism reached, and as long as it 
lasted, there was no abstraction, or classification of 
objects, and no room consequently for the metaphy- 
sical mode of thought. But as soon as the volun- 
tary agent, whose will governed the phenomenon, 
ceased to be the physical object itself, and was re- 
moved to an invisible position, from which he or 
she superintended an entire class of natural agen- 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 21 

cies, it began to seem impossible that this being 
should exert his powerful activity from a distance, 
unless through the medium of something present 
on the spot. Through the same Natural Prejudice 
which made Newton unable to conceive the pos- 
sibility of his own law of gravitation without a 
subtle ether filling up the intervening space, and 
through which the attraction could be communi- 
cated — from this same natural infirmity of the 
human mind, it seemed indispensable that the god, 
at a distance from the object, must act through 
something residing in it, which was the immediate 
agent, the god having imparted to the intermediate 
something the power whereby it influenced and di- 
rected the object. When mankind felt a need for 
naming these imaginary entities, they called them 
the nature of the object, or its essence, or virtues resid- 
ing in it, or by many other different names. These 
metaphysical conceptions were regarded as intensely 
real, and at first as mere instruments in the hands of 
the appropriate deities. But the habit being acquired 
of ascribing not only substantive existence, but real 
and efficacious agency, to the abstract entities, the 
consequence was that when belief in the deities de- 
clined and faded away, the entities were left stand- 
ing, and a semblance of explanation of phenomena, 
equal to what existed before, was furnished by the 
entities alone, without referring them to any voli- 
tions. When things had reached this point, the 
metaphysical mode of thought had completely sub- 
stituted itself for the theological. 

Thus did the different successive states of the 



22 AUGU3TE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

human intellect, even at an early stage of its pro- 
gress, overlap one another, the Petichistic, the Poly- 
theistic, and the Metaphysical modes of thought 
coexisting even in the same minds, while the helief 
in invariable laws, which constitutes the Positive 
mode of thought, was slowly winning its way be- 
neath them all, as observation and experience dis- 
closed in one class of phenomena after another the 
laws to which they are really subject. It was this 
growth of positive knowledge which principally 
determined the next transition in the theological 
conception of the universe, from Polytheism to 
Monotheism. 

It cannot be doubted that this transition took 
place very tardily. The conception of a unity in 
Nature, which wo aid admit of attributing it to a 
single will, is far from being natural to man, and 
only finds admittance after a long period of discipline 
and preparation, the obvious appearances all point- 
ing to the idea of a government by many conflicting 
principles. We know how high a degree both of 
material civilization and of moral and intellectual 
development preceded the conversion of the lead- 
ing populations of the world to the belief in one 
God. The superficial observations by which Chris- 
tian travellers have persuaded themselves that they 
found their own Monotheistic belief in some tribes 
of savages, have always been contradicted by more 
accurate knowledge : those who have read, for in- 
stance, Mr Kohl's Kitchigami, know what to think 
of the Great Spirit of the American Indians, who 
belongs to a well-defined system of Polytheism, 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 23 

interspersed with large remains of an original Fe- 
tichism. We have no wish to dispute the matter 
with those who believe that Monotheism was the 
primitive religion, transmitted to our race from its 
first parents in uninterrupted tradition. By their 
own acknowledgment, the tradition was lost by 
all the nations of the world except a small and pecu- 
liar people, in whom it was miraculously kept alive, 
but who were themselves continually lapsing from 
it, and in all the earlier parts of their history did 
not hold it at all in its full meaning, but admitted 
the real existence of other gods, though believing 
their own to be the most powerful, and to be the 
Creator of the world. A greater proof of the un- 
naturalness of Monotheism to the human mind be- 
fore a certain period in its development, could not 
well be required. The highest form of Monotheism, 
Christianity, has persisted to the present time in 
giving partial satisfaction to the mental dispositions 
that lead to Polytheism, by admitting into its theo- 
logy the thoroughly polytheistic conception of a 
devil. When Monotheism, after many centuries, 
made its way to the Greeks and Romans from the 
small corner of the world where it existed, we know 
how the notion of dsemons facilitated its reception, 
by making it unnecessary for Christian s to deny the 
existence of the gods previously believed in, it being 
sufficient to place them under the absolute power of 
the new Cod, as the gods of Olympus were already 
under that of Zeus, and as the local deities of all the 
subjugated nations had been subordinated by con- 
quest to the divine patrons of the Roman State. 



24 AXTGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

In whatever mode, natural or supernatural, we 
choose to account for the early Monotheism of the 
Hebrews, there can be no question that its reception 
by the Gentiles was only rendered possible by the 
slow preparation which the human mind had un- 
dergone from the philosophers. In the age of the 
Caesars nearly the whole educated and cultivated 
class had outgrown the polytheistic creed, and 
though individually liable to returns of the su- 
perstition of their childhood, were predisposed 
(such of them as did not reject all religion what- 
ever) to the acknowledgment of one Supreme 
Providence. It is vain to object that Christianity 
did not find the majority of its early proselytes 
among the educated class : since, except in 
Palestine, its teachers and propagators were 
mainly of that class — many of them, like St 
Paul, well versed in the mental culture of their 
time ; and they had evidently found no intellectual 
obstacle to the new doctrine in their own minds. 
We must not^be deceived by the recrudescence, at 
a much later date, of a metaphysical Paganism in 
the Alexandrian and other philosophical schools, 
provoked not by attachment to Polytheism, but by 
distaste for the political and social ascendancy of 
the Christian teachers. The fact was, that Mono- 
theism had become congenial to the cultivated 
mind : and a belief which has gained the cultivated 
minds of any society, unless put down by force, is 
certain, sooner or later, to reach the multitude. 
Indeed the multitude itself had been prepared for 
it, as already hinted, by the more and more com- 



ATTGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 25 

plete subordination of all other deities to the su- 
premacy of Zeus ; from which the step to a single 
Deity, surrounded by a host of angels, and keeping 
in recalcitrant subjection an army of devils, was by 
no means difficult. 

By what means, then, had the cultivated minds 
of the Roman Empire been educated for Monothe- 
ism ? By the growth of a practical feeling of the 
invariability of natural laws. Monotheism had a 
natural adaptation to this belief, while Polytheism 
naturally and necessarily conflicted with it. As 
men could not easily, and in fact never did, suppose 
that beings so powerful had their power absolutely 
restricted, each to its special department, the will 
of any divinity might always be frustrated by 
another : and unless all their wills were in com- 
plete harmony (which would itself be the most 
difficult to credit of all cases of invariability, and 
would require beyond anything else the ascendancy 
of a Supreme Deity) it was impossible that the 
course of any of the phenomena under their govern- 
ment could be invariable. But if, on the contrary, 
all the phenomena of the universe were under the 
exclusive and uncontrollable influence of a single 
will, it was an admissible supposition that this 
will might be always consistent with itself, and 
might choose to conduct each class of its operations 
in an invariable manner. In proportion, therefore, 
as the invariable laws of phenomena revealed them- 
selves to observers, the theory which ascribed 
them all to one will began to grow plausible; 
but must still have appeared improbable until it 



26 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

had come to seem likely that invariability was the 
common rule of all nature. The Greeks and 
Romans at the Christian era had reached a point 
of advancement at which this supposition had be- 
come probable. The admirable height to which 
geometry had already been carried, had familiarized 
the educated mind with the conception of laws 
absolutely invariable. The logical analysis of the 
intellectual processes by Aristotle had shown a 
similar uniformity of law in the realm of mind. In 
the concrete external world, the most imposing 
phsenomena,/ those of the heavenly bodies, which 
by their power over the imagination had done most 
to keep up the whole system of ideas connected 
with supernatural agency, had been ascertained to 
take place in so regular an order as to admit of 
being predicted with a precision which to the 
notions of those days must have appeared perfect. 
And though an equal degree of regularity had not 
been discerned in natural phenomena generally, 
even the most empirical observation had ascertained 
so many cases of an uniformity almost complete, 
that inquiring minds were eagerly on the look-out 
for further indications pointing in the same direc- 
tion ; and vied with one another in the formation 
of theories which, though hypothetical and essen- 
tially premature, it was hoped would turn out to be 
correct representations of invariable laws governing 
large classes of phenomena. When this hope and 
expectation became general, they were already a 
great encroachment on the original domain of the 
theological principle. Instead of the old concep- 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 27 

tion, of events regulated from day to day by the 
unforeseen and changeable volitions of a legion of 
deities, it seemed more and more probable that all 
the phaenomena of the universe took place accord- 
ing to rules which must have been planned from 
the beginning ; by which conception the function 
of the gods seemed to be limited to forming the 
plans, and setting the machinery in motion : their 
subsequent office appeared to be reduced to a sine- 
cure, or if they continued to reign, it was in the 
manner of constitutional kings, bound by the laws 
to which they had previously given their assent. 
Accordingly, the pretension of philosophers to 
explain physical phaenomena by physical causes, or 
to predict their occurrence, was, up to a very late 
period of Polytheism, regarded as a sacrilegious in- 
sult to the gods. Anaxagoras was banished for it, 
Aristotle had to fly for his life, and the mere 
unfounded suspicion of it contributed greatly to 
the condemnation of Socrates. We are too well 
acquainted with this form of the religious sentiment 
even now, to have any difficulty in comprehending 
what must have been its violence then. It was 
inevitable that philosophers should be anxious to 
get rid of at least these gods, and so escape from the 
particular fables which stood immediately in their 
way ; accepting a notion of divine government 
which harmonized better with the lessons they 
learnt from the study of nature, and a God con- 
cerning whom no mythos, as far as they knew, had 
yet been invented. 

Again, when the idea became prevalent that the 



28 ATJGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

constitution of every part of Nature had been plan- 
ned from the beginning, and continued to take place 
as it had been planned, this was itself a striking 
feature of resemblance extending through all 
Nature, and affording a presumption that the 
whole was the work, not of many, but of the same 
hand. It must have appeared vastly more probable 
that there should be one indefinitely foreseeing 
Intelligence and immovable Will, than hundreds 
and thousands of such. The philosophers had not 
at that time the arguments which might have been 
grounded on universal laws not yet suspected, 
such as the law of gravitation and the laws of heat; 
but there was a multitude, obvious even to them, of 
analogies and homologies in natural phsenomena, 
which suggested unity of plan ; and a still greater 
number were raised up by their active fancy, aided 
by their premature scientific theories, all of which 
aimed at interpreting some phenomenon by the 
analogy of others supposed to be better known ; 
assuming, indeed, a much greater similarity among 
the various processes of Nature, than ampler expe- 
rience has since shown to exist. The theological 
mode of thought thus advanced from Polytheism to 
Monotheism through the direct influence of the 
Positive mode of thought, not yet aspiring to com- 
plete speculative ascendancy. But, inasmuch as 
the belief in the invariability of natural laws was 
still imperfect even in highly cultivated minds, and 
in the merest infancy in the uncultivated, it gave 
rise to the belief in one God, but not in an immovable 
one. For many centuries the God believed in was 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 29 

flexible by entreaty, was incessantly ordering the 
affairs of mankind by direct volitions, and continu- 
ally reversing the course of nature by miraculous 
interpositions ; and this is believed still, wherever 
the invariability of law has established itself in 
men's convictions as a general, but not as an uni- 
versal truth. 

In the change from Polytheism to Monotheism, 
the Metaphysical mode of thought contributed its 
part, affording great aid to the up-hill struggle 
which the Positive spirit had to maintain against 
the prevailing form of the Theological. M. Comte, 
indeed, has considerably exaggerated the share of 
the Metaphysical spirit in this mental revolution, 
since by a lax use of terms he credits the Metaphy- 
sical mode of thought with all that is due to dialec- 
tics and negative criticism — to the exposure of 
inconsistencies and absurdities in the received reli- 
gions. But this operation is quite independent of 
the Metaphysical mode of thought, and was no 
otherwise connected with it than in being very 
generally carried on by the same minds (Plato is a 
brilliant example), since the most eminent effici- 
ency in it does not necessarily depend on the pos- 
session of positive scientific knowledge. But the 
Metaphysical spirit, strictly so called, did contri- 
bute largely to the advent of Monotheism. The 
conception of impersonal entities, interposed be- 
tween the governing deity and the phaanomena, 
and forming the machinery through which these 
are immediately produced, is not repugnant, as the 
theory of direct supernatural volitions is, to the 



30 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

belief in invariable laws. The entities not being, 
like the gods, framed after the exemplar of men — 
being neither, like them, invested with human 
passions, nor supposed, like them, to have power 
beyond the phsenomena which are the special de- 
partment of each, there was no fear of offending 
them by the attempt to foresee and define their 
action, or by the supposition that it took place 
according to fixed laws. The popular tribunal 
which condemned Anaxagoras had evidently not 
risen to the metaphysical point of view. Hippo- 
crates, who was concerned only with a select and 
instructed class, could say with impunity, speaking 
of what were called the god-inflicted diseases, that 
to his mind they were neither more nor less god- 
inflicted than all others. The doctrine of abstract 
entities was a kind of instinctive conciliation be- 
tween the observed uniformity of the facts of nature, 
and their dependence on arbitrary volition ; since 
it was easier to conceive a single volition as setting 
a machinery to work, which afterwards went on of 
itself, than to suppose an inflexible constancy in so 
capricious and changeable a thing as volition must 
then have appeared. But though the regime of 
abstractions was in strictness compatible with Poly- 
theism, it demanded Monotheism as the condition 
of its free development. The received Polytheism 
being only the first remove from Petichism, its 
gods were too closely mixed up in the daily details 
of phenomena, and the habit of propitiating them 
and ascertaining their will before any important 
action of life was too inveterate, to admit, without 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 31 

the strongest shock to the received system, the 
notion that they did not habitually rule by special 
interpositions, but left phenomena in all ordinary 
cases to the operation of the essences or peculiar 
natures which they had first implanted in them. 
Any modification of Polytheism which would have 
made it fully compatible with the Metaphysical 
conception of the world, would have been more 
difficult to effect than the transition to Monotheism, 
as Monotheism was at first conceived. 

We have given, in our own way, and at some 
length, this important portion of M. Comte's view 
of the evolution of human thought, as a sample of 
the manner in which his theory corresponds with 
and interprets historical facts, and also to obviate 
some objections to it, grounded on an imperfect 
comprehension, or rather on a mere first glance. 
Some, for example, think the doctrine of the three 
successive stages of speculation and belief, incon- 
sistent with the fact that they all three existed 
contemporaneously ; much as if the natural suc- 
cession of the hunting, the nomad, and the agri- 
cultural state could be refuted by the fact that there 
are still hunters and nomads. That the three 
states were contemporaneous, that they all began 
before authentic history, and still coexist, is M. 
Comte's express statement : as well as that the ad- 
vent of the two later modes of thought was the 
very cause which disorganized and is gradually de- 
stroying the primitive one. The Theological mode 
of explaining phenomena was once universal, with 
the exception, doubtless, of the familiar facts 




32 AUGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

which, being even then seen to be controllable by 
human will, belonged already to the positive mode 
of thought. The first and easiest generalizations 
of common observation, anterior to the first traces 
of the scientific spirit, determined the birth of the 
Metaphysical mode of thought; and every further 
advance in the observation of nature, gradually 
bringing to light its invariable laws, determined a 
further development of the Metaphysical spirit at 
the expense of the Theological, this being the only 
medium through which the conclusions of the Posi- 
tive mode of thought and the premises of the Theo- 
logical could be temporarily made compatible. At a 
later period, when the real character of the positive 
laws of nature had come to be in a certain degree 
understood, and the theological idea had assumed, 
in scientific minds, its final character, that of a 
God governing by general laws, the positive spirit, 
having now no longer need of the fictitious medium 
of imaginary entities, set itself to the easy task of 
demolishing the instrument by which it had risen. 
But though it destroyed the actual belief in the 
objective reality of these abstractions, that belief 
has left behind it vicious tendencies of the human 
mind, which are still far enough from being extin- 
guished, and which we shall presently have occa- 
sion to characterize. 

The next point on which we have to touch is 
one of greater importance than it seems. If all 
human speculation had to pass through the three 
stages, we may presume that its different branches, 
having always been very unequally advanced, could 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 33 

not pass from one stage to another at the same 
time. There must have been a certain order of 
succession in which the different sciences would 
enter, first into the metaphysical, and afterwards 
into the purely positive stage ; and this order M. 
Comte proceeds to investigate. The result is his 
remarkable conception of a scale of subordination 
of the sciences, being the order of the logical de- 
pendence of those which follow on those which 
precede. It is not at first obvious how a mere 
classification of the sciences can be not merely a 
help to their study, but itself an important part of 
a body of doctrine ; the classification, however, 
is a very important part of M. Comte' s philo- 
sophy. 

He first distinguishes between the abstract 
and the concrete sciences. The abstract sciences 
have to do with the laws which govern the ele- 
mentary facts of Nature ; laws on which all phe- 
nomena actually realized must of course depend, but 
which would have been equally compatible with 
many other combinations than those which actually 
come to pass. The concrete sciences, on the con- 
trary, concern themselves only with the particular 
combinations of phenomena which are found in 
existence. For example ; the minerals which 
compose our planet, or are found in it, have been 
produced and are held together by the laws of 
mechanical aggregation and by those of chemical 
union. It is the business of the abstract sciences, 
Physics and Chemistry, to ascertain these laws : 
to discover how and under what conditions bodies 



34 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

may become aggregated, and what are the possible 
modes and results of chemical combination. The 
great majority of these aggregations and combina- 
tions take place, so far as we are aware, only in 
our laboratories ; with these the concrete science, 
Mineralogy, has nothing to do. Its business is 
with those aggregates, and those chemical com- 
pounds, which form themselves, or have at some 
period been formed, in the natural world. 'Again, 
Physiology, the abstract science, investigates, by 
such means as are available to it, the general laws 
of organization and life. Those laws determine 
what living beings are possible, and maintain the 
existence and determine the phsenomena of those 
which actually exist : but they would be equally 
capable of maintaining in existence plants and ani- 
mal* very different from these. The concrete 
sciences, Zoology and Botany, confine themselves 
to species which really exist, or can be shown to 
have really existed : and do not concern them- 
selves with the mode in which even these would 
comport themselves under all circumstances, but 
only under those which really take place. They 
set forth the actual mode of existence of plants 
and animals, the phsenomena which they in fact 
present : but they set forth all of these, and take 
into simultaneous consideration the whole real ex- 
istence of each species, however various the ulti- 
mate laws on which it depends, and to whatever 
number of different abstract sciences these laws 
may belong. The existence of a date tree, or of a 
lion, is a joint result of many natural laws, phy- 



AXJGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 35 

sical, chemical, biological, and even astronomical. 
Abstract science deals with these laws separately, 
but considers each of them in all its aspects, all its 
possibilities of operation : concrete science consi- 
ders them only in combination, and so far as they 
exist and manifest themselves in the animals or 
plants of which we have experience. The distinc- 
tive attributes of the two are summed up by M. 
Comte in the expression, that concrete science re- 
lates to Beings, or Objects, abstract science to 
Events.* 

* Mr Herbert Spencer, who also distinguishes between abstract 
and concrete sciences, employs the terms in a different sense from that 
explained above. He calls a science abstract when its truths are 
merely ideal ; when, like the truths of geometry, they are not exactly 
true of real things — or, like the so-called law of inertia (the persistence 
in direction and velocity of a motion once impressed) are " involved " in 
experience but never actually seen in it, being always more or less 
completely frustrated. Chemistry and biology he includes, on the 
contrary, among concrete sciences, because chemical combinations and 
decompositions, and the physiological action of tissues, do actually take 
place (as our senses testify) in the manner in which the scientific pro- 
positions state them to take place. We will not discuss the logical or 
philological propriety of either use of the terms abstract and concrete, 
in which two-fold point of view very few of the numerous acceptations 
of these words are entirely defensible : but of the two distinctions M. 
Comte's answers to by far the deepest and most vital difference. Mr 
Spencer's is open to the radical objection, that it classifies truths not 
according to their subject-matter or their mutual relations, but accord- 
ing to an unimportant difference in the manner in which we come to 
know them. Of what consequence is it that the law of inertia (con- 
sidered as an exact truth) is not generalized from our direct perceptions, 
but inferred by combining with the movements which we see, those 
which we should see if it were not for the disturbing causes ? In 
either case we are equally certain that it is an exact truth : for every 
dynamical law is perfectly fulfilled even when it seems to be counter- 

3 * 



36 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

The concrete sciences are inevitably later in 
their development than the abstract sciences on 
which they depend. Not that they begin later to 
be studied ; on the contrary, they are the earliest 
cultivated, since in our abstract investigations we 
necessarily set out from spontaneous facts. But 
though we may make empirical generalizations, we 
can form no scientific theory of concrete pheno- 
mena until the laws which govern and explain 
them are first known ; and those laws are the sub- 
ject of the abstract sciences. In consequence, 
there is not one of the concrete studies (unless we 
count astronomy among them) which has received, 
up to the present time, its final scientific constitu- 
tion, or can be accounted a science, except in a 
very loose sense, but only materials for science : 
partly from insufficiency of facts, but more, be- 
cause the abstract sciences, except those at the 
very beginning of the scale, have not attained the 
degree of perfection necessary to render real con- 
crete sciences possible. 

Postponing, therefore, the concrete sciences, as 
not yet formed, but only tending towards forma- 
tion, the abstract sciences remain to be classed. 
These, as marked out by M. Comte, are six in 
number ; and the principle which he proposes for 
their classification is admirably in accordance with 
the conditions of our study of Nature. It might 

acted. There must, we should think, be many truths in physiology 
(for example) which are only known by a similar indirect process ; and 
Mr Spencer would hardly detach these from the body of the science, 
and call them abstract and the remainder concrete. 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 37 

have happened that the different classes of pheno- 
mena had depended on laws altogether distinct ; 
that in changing from one to another subject of 
scientific study, the student left behind all the 
laws he previously knew, and passed under the do- 
minion of a totally new set of uniformities. The 
sciences would then have been wholly independent 
of one another ; each would have rested entirely 
on its own inductions, and if deductive at all, 
would have drawn its deductions from premises 
exclusively furnished by itself. The fact, however, 
is otherwise. The relation which really subsists 
between different kinds of phenomena, enables the 
sciences to be arranged in such an order, that in 
travelling through them we do not pass out of the 
sphere of any laws, but merely take up additional 
ones at each step. In this order M. Comte pro- 
poses to arrange them. He classes the sciences in 
an ascending series, according to the degree of 
complexity of their phenomena; so that each 
science depends on the truths of all those which 
precede it, with the addition of peculiar truths of 
its own. 

Thus, the truths of number are true of all things, 
and depend only on their own laws ; the science, 
therefore, of Number, consisting of Arithmetic and 
Algebra, may be studied without reference to any 
other science. The truths of Geometry presuppose 
the laws of Number, and a more special class of 
laws peculiar to extended bodies, but require no 
others : Geometry, therefore, can be studied inde- 
pendently of all sciences except that of Number. 



38 ATTGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

Rational Mechanics presupposes, and depends on, 
the laws of number and those of extension, and 
along with them another set of laws, those of Equi- 
librium and Motion. The truths of Algebra and 
Geometry nowise depend on these last, and would 
have been true if these had happened to be the re- 
verse of what we find them : but the phsenomena of 
equilibrium and motion cannot be understood, nor 
even stated, without assuming the laws of number 
and extension, such as they actually are. The 
phsenomena of Astronomy depend on these three 
classes of laws, and on the law of gravitation be- 
sides ; which last has no influence on the truths of 
number, geometry, or mechanics. Physics (badly 
named in common English parlance Natural Phi- 
losophy) presupposes the three mathematical sci- 
ences, and also astronomy ; since all terrestrial 
phsenomena are affected by influences derived from 
the motions of the earth and of the heavenly bodies. 
Chemical phsenomena depend (besides their own 
laws) on all the preceding, those of physics among 
the rest, especially on the laws of heat and electri- 
city ; physiological phsenomena, on the laws of 
physics and chemistry, and their own laws in addi- 
tion. The phsenomena of human society obey laws 
of their own, but do not depend solely upon these : 
they depend upon all the laws of organic and animal 
life, together with those of inorganic nature, these 
last influencing society not only through their in- 
fluence on life, but by determining the physical con- 
ditions under which society has to be carried on. 
" Chacun de ces degres successifs exige des indue- 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 89 

tions qui lui sont propres ; mais elles ne peuvent 
jamais devenir systematiques que sous l'impulsion 
deductive resultee de tous les ordres moins compli- 
ques."* 

Thus arranged by M. Comte in a series, of which 
each term represents an advance in speciality be- 
yond the term preceding it, and (what necessarily 
accompanies increased speciality) an increase of 
complexity — a set of phenomena determined by a 
more numerous combination of laws ; the sciences 
stand in the following order : 1st, Mathematics ; 
its three branches following one another on the 
same principle, Number, Geometry, Mechanics. 
2nd, Astronomy. 3rd, Physics. 4th, Chemistry. 
5th, Biology. 6th, Sociology, or the Social Science, 
the phenomena of which depend on, and cannot be 
understood without, the principal truths of all the 
other sciences. The subject matter and contents of 
these various sciences are obvious of themselves, 
with the exception of Physics, which is a group of 
sciences rather than a single science, and is again 
divided by M. Comte into five departments : Baro- 
logy, or the science of weight; Thermology, or that 
of heat ; Acoustics, Optics, and Electrology. These 
he attempts to arrange on the same principle of in- 
creasing speciality and complexity, but they hardly 
admit of such a scale, and M. Comte' s mode of 
placing them varied at different periods. All the 
five being essentially independent of one another, 
he attached little importance to their order, except 
that barology ought to come first, as the connecting 

s;> Systeme de Politique Positive, ii. 3G. 



40 AUGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

link with astronomy, and electrology last, as the 
transition to chemistry. 

If the best classification is that which is ground- 
ed on the properties most important for our pur- 
poses, this classification will stand the test. By 
placing the sciences in the order of the complexity 
of their subject matter, it presents them in the order 
of their difficulty. Each science proposes to itself 
a more arduous inquiry than those which precede 
it in the series ; it is therefore likely to be suscept- 
ible, even finally, of a less degree of perfection, and 
will certainly arrive later at the degree attainable 
by it. In addition to this, each science, to estab- 
lish its own truths, needs those of all the sciences 
anterior to it. The only means, for example, by 
which the physiological laws of life could have been 
ascertained, was by distinguishing, among the mul- 
tifarious and complicated facts of life, the portion 
which physical and chemical laws cannot ac- 
count for. Only by thus isolating the effects of the 
peculiar organic laws, did it become possible to dis- 
cover what these are. It follows that the order in 
which the sciences succeed one another in the 
series, cannot but be, in the main, the historical 
order of their development ; and is the only order 
in which they can rationally be studied. Eor 
this last there is an additional reason : since the 
more special and complete sciences require not only 
the truths of the simpler and more general ones, 
but still more their methods. The scientific intel- 
lect, both in the individual and in the race, must 
learn in the more elementary studies that art of in- 



AUGTTSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 41 

vestigation and those canons of proof which are to 
be pnt in practice in the more elevated. No intel- 
lect is properly qualified for the higher part of the 
scale, without due practice in the lower. 

Mr Herbert Spencer, in his essay entitled " The 
Genesis of Science," and more recently in a pam- 
phlet on "the Classification of the Sciences," has 
criticised and condemned M. Comte's classification, 
and proposed a more elaborate one of his own : and 
M. Littre\ in his valuable biographical and philoso- 
phical work on M. Comte (" Auguste Comte et 
la Philosophic Positive "), has at some length criti- 
cised the criticism. Mr Spencer is one of the small 
number of persons who by the solidity and ency- 
clopedical character of their knowledge, and their 
power of co-ordination and concatenation, may 
claim to be the peers of M. Comte, and entitled to 
a vote in the estimation of him. But after giving 
to his animadversions the respectful attention due 
to all that comes from Mr Spencer, we cannot find 
that he has made out any case. It is always easy 
to find fault with a classification. There are a hun- 
dred possible ways of arranging any set of objects, 
and something may almost always be said against 
the best, and in favour of the worst of them. But 
the merits of a classification depend on the purposes 
to which it is instrumental. We have shown the pur- 
poses for which M. Comte's classification is intended. 
Mr Spencer has not shown that it is ill adapted to 
those purposes : and we cannot perceive that his 
own answers any ends equally important. Plis chief 
objection is that if the more special sciences need 



42 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

the truths of the more general ones, the latter also 
need some of those of the former, and have at times 
been stopped in their progress by the imperfect state 
of sciences which follow long after them in M. 
Comte's scale ; so that, the dependence being 
mutual, there is a consensus, but not an ascending 
scale or hierarchy of the sciences. That the earlier 
sciences derive help from the later is undoubtedly 
true ; it is part of M. Comte's theory, and amply 
exemplified in the details of his work. When he 
affirms that one science historically precedes another, 
he does not mean that the perfection of the first 
precedes the humblest commencement of those 
which follow. Mr Spencer does not distinguish 
between the empirical stage of the cultivation of a 
branch of knowledge, and the scientific stage. The 
commencement of every study consists in gathering 
together unanalyzed facts, and treasuring up such 
spontaneous generalizations as present themselves 
to natural sagacity. - In this stage any branch of 
inquiry can be carried on independently of every 
other ; and it is one of M. Comte's own remarks 
that the most complex, in a scientific point of view, 
of all studies, the latest in his series, the study of 
man as a moral and social being, since from its ab- 
sorbing interest it is cultivated more or less by every 
one, and pre-eminently by the great practical minds, 
acquired at an early period a greater stock of just 
though unscientific observations than the more ele- 
mentary sciences. It is these empirical truths that 
the later and more special sciences lend to the ear- 
lier ; or, at most, some extremely elementary scien- 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 43 

tine truth, which happening to be easily ascertain- 
able by direct experiment, could be made available 
for carrying a previous science already founded, to a 
higher stage of development ; a re-action of the 
later sciences on the earlier which M. Cornte not 
only fully recognized, but attached great import- 
ance to systematizing.* 

But though detached truths relating to the more 
complex order of phenomena may be empirically 
observed, and a few of them even scientifically estab- 

* The strongest case which Mr Spencer produces of a scientifically 
ascertained law, which, though belonging to a later science, was neces- 
sary to the scientific formation of one occupying an earlier place in M. 
Comte's series, is the law of the accelerating force of gravity ; which 
M. Comte places in Physics, but without which the Newtonian theory 
of the celestial motions could not have been discovered, nor could even 
now be proved. This fact, as is judiciously remarked byM. Littre, is not 
valid against the plan of M. Comte's classification, but discloses a slight 
error in the detail. M. Comte should not have placed the laws of ter- 
restrial gravity under Physics. ■ They are part of the general theory of 
gravitation, and belong to astronomy. Mr Spencer has hit one of the 
weak points in M. Comte's scientific scale ; weak however only because 
left unguarded. Astronomy, the second of M. Comte's abstract sciences, 
answers to his own definition of a concrete science. M. Comte however 
was only wrong in overlooking a distinction. There is an abstract 
science of astronomy, namely, the theory of gravitation, which would 
equally agree with and explain the facts of a totally different solar sys- 
tem from the one of which our earth forms a part. The actual facts of 
our own system, the dimensions, distances, velocities, temperatures, 
physical constitution, &c, of the sun, earth, and planets, are properly 
the subject of a concrete science, similar to natural history ; but the 
concrete is more inseparably united to the abstract science than in any 
other case, since the few celestial facts really accessible to us are nearly 
all required for discovering and proving the law of gravitation as an 
universal property of bodies, and have therefore an indispensable place 
in the abstract science as its fundamental data. 



44 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

lished, contemporaneously with an early stage of 
some of the sciences anterior in the scale, such de- 
tached truths, as M. Littre* justly remarks, do not 
constitute a science. What is known of a subject, 
only becomes a science when it is made a connected 
body of truth ; in which the relation between the 
general principles and the details is definitely made 
out, and each particular truth can be recognized as 
a case of the operation of wider laws. This point of 
progress, at which the study passes from the prelim- 
inary state of mere preparation, into a science, can- 
not be reached by the more complex studies until it 
has been attained by the simpler ones. A certain 
regularity of recurrence in the celestial appearances 
was ascertained empirically before much progress 
had been made in geometry ; but astronomy could 
no more be a science until geometry was a highly 
advanced one, than the rule of three could have 
been practised before addition and subtraction. 
The truths of the simpler sciences are a part of 
the laws to which the phenomena of the more 
complex sciences conform : and are not only a 
necessary element in their explanation, but must 
be so well understood as to be traceable through 
complex combinations, before the special laws which 
co-exist and co-operate with them can be brought 
to light. This is all that M. Comte affirms, and 
enough for his purpose.* He no doubt occasion - 

* The only point at which the general principle of the series fails 
in its application, is the subdivision of Physics ; and there, as the 
subordination of the different branches scarcely exists, their order is of 
little consequence. Thermology, indeed, is altogether an exception to 
the principle of decreasing generality, heat, as Mr Spencer truly says 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 45 

ally indulges in more unqualified expressions than 
can be completely justified, regarding the logical 
perfection of the construction of his series, and its 
exact correspondence with the historical evolution 
of the sciences ; exaggerations confined to lan- 
guage, and which the details of his exposition 
often correct. But he is sufficiently near the 
truth, in both respects, for every practical pur- 
pose.* Minor inaccuracies must often be forgiven 

being as universal as gravitation. But the place of Thermology is 
marked out, within certain narrow limits, by the ends of the classifica- 
tion, though not by its principle. The desideratum is, that every 
science should precede those which cannot be scientifically constituted 
or rationally studied until it is known. It is as a means to this end, 
that the arrangement of the phsenomena in the order of their depend- 
ence on one another is important. Now, though heat is as universal 
a phenomenon as any which external nature presents, its laws do not 
affect, in any manner important to us, the phenomena of Astronomy, 
and operate in the other branches of Physics only as slight modifying 
agencies, the consideration of which may be postponed to a rather ad- 
vanced stage. But the phsenomena of Chemistry and Biology depend 
on them often for their very existence. The ends of the classification 
require therefore that Thermology should precede Chemistry and 
Biology, but do not demand that it should be thrown farther back. 
On the other hand, those same ends, in another point of view, require 
that it should be subsequent to Astronomy, for reasons not of doctrine 
but of method : Astronomy being the best school of the true art of 
interpreting Nature, by which Thermology profits like other sciences, 
but which it was ill adapted to originate. 

# The philosophy of the subject is perhaps nowhere so well ex- 
pressed as in the " Systeme de Politique Positive " (iii. 41). " Congu 
logiquement, l'ordre suivant lequel nos principales theories accomplis- 
sent revolution fondamentale resulte necessairement de leur depend- 
ance mutuelle. Toutes les sciences peuvent, sans doute, etre ebauchees 
a la fois : leur usage pratique exige meme cette culture simultanee. 
Mais elle ne peut concerner que les inductions propres a chaque classe 



46 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

even to great thinkers. Mr Spencer, in the very 
writings in which he criticises M. Comte, affords 
signal instances of them.* 

de speculations. Or cet essor inductif ne saurait fournir des principes 
suffisants qu'envers les plus simples etudes. Partout ailleurs, ils ne 
peuvent etre etablis qu'en subordonnant chaque genre d'inductions 
scientifiques a l'ensemble des deductions emanees des domaines moins 
compliques, et des-lors moins dependants. Ainsi nos diverses theories 
reposent dogmatiquement les unes sur les autres, suivant un ordre 
invariable, qui doit regler historiquement leur avenement decisif, les 
plus indepeudantes ayant toujours du se developper plus tot." 

* " Science." says Mr Spencer in his " Genesis," " while purely in- 
ductive is purely qualitative. . . . All quantitative prevision is reached 
deductively; induction can achieve only qualitative prevision." Now, 
if we remember that the very first accurate quantitative law of physical 
phenomena ever established, the law of the accelerating force of gravity, 
was discovered and proved by Galileo partly at least by experiment ; 
that the quantitative laws on which the whole theory of the celestial 
motions is grounded, were generalized by Kepler from direct compari- 
son of observations ; that the quantitative law of the condensation of 
gases by pressure, the law of Boyle and Mariotte, was arrived at by 
direct experiment ; that the proportional quantities in which every 
known substance combines chemically with every other, were ascer- 
tained by innumerable experiments, from which the general law of 
chemical equivalents, now the ground of the most exact quantitative 
previsions, was an inductive generalization ; we must conclude that 
Mr Spencer has committed himself to a general proposition, which a 
very slight consideration of truths perfectly known to him would have 
shown to be unsustainable. 

Again, in the very pamphlet in which Mr Spencer defends himself 
against the supposition of being a disciple of M. Comte (" The Classi- 
fication of the Sciences," p. 37), he speaks of " M. Comte's adherent, 
Mr Buckle." Now, except in the opinion common to both, that his- 
tory may be made a subject of science, the speculations of these two 
thinkers are not only different, but run in different channels, M. Comte 
applying himself principally to the laws of evolution common to all 
mankind, Mr Buckle almost exclusively to the diversities: and it may 



AUGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 47 

Combining the doctrines, that every science is 
in a less advanced state as it occnpies a higher 
place in the ascending scale, and that all the 
sciences pass through the three stages, theological, 
metaphysical, and positive, it follows that the more 
special a science is, the tardier is it in effecting each 
transition, so that a completely positive state of an 
earlier science has often coincided with the meta- 
physical state of the one next to it, and a purely 
theological state of those further on. This statement 
correctly represents the general course of the facts, 
though requiring allowances in the detail. Mathe- 
matics, for example, from the very beginning of its 
cultivation, can hardly at any time have been in 
the theological state, though exhibiting many traces 
of the metaphysical. No one, probably, ever be- 
lieved that the will of a god kept parallel lines 
from meeting, or made two and two equal to four ; 
or ever prayed to the gods to make the square of 
the hypothenuse equal to more or less than the 
sum of the squares of the sides. The most devout 
believers have recognized in propositions of this 

be affirmed without presumption, that they neither saw the same 
truths, nor fell into the same errors, nor defended their opinions, either 
true or erroneous, by the same arguments. Indeed, it is one of the 
surprising things in the case of Mr Buckle as of Mr Spencer, that being 
a man of kindred genius, of the same wide range of knowledge, and 
devoting himself to speculations of the same kind, he profited so little 
by M. Comte. 

These oversights prove nothing against the general accuracy of Mr 
Spencer's acquirements. They are mere lapses of inattention, such 
as thinkers who attempt speculations requiring that vast multitudes of 
facts should be kept in recollection at once, can scarcely hope always 
to avoid. 



48 AUGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

description, a class of truths independent of the 
divine omnipotence. Even ainong the truths which 
popular philosophy calls by the misleading name 
of Contingent, the few which are at once exact 
and obvious were probably, from the very first, ex- 
cepted from the theological explanation. M. Comte 
observes, after Adam Smith, that we are not told in 
any age or country of a god of Weight. It was 
otherwise with Astronomy : the heavenly bodies 
were believed not merely to be moved by gods, but 
to be gods themselves : and when this theory was 
exploded, their movements were explained by me- 
taphysical conceptions ; such as a tendency of 
Nature to perfection, in virtue of which these 
sublime bodies, being left to themselves, move in 
the most perfect orbit, the circle. Even Kepler 
was full of fancies of this description, which only 
terminated when Newton, by unveiling the real 
physical laws of the celestial motions, closed the 
metaphysical period of astronomical science. As M. 
Comte remarks, our power of foreseeing pheno- 
mena, and our power of controlling them, are the 
two things which destroy the belief of their being 
governed by changeable wills. In the case of 
pheenomena which science has not yet taught us 
either to foresee or to control, the theological mode 
of thought has not ceased to operate : men still 
pray for rain, or for success in war, or to avert a 
shipwreck or a pestilence, but not to put back the 
stars in their courses, to abridge the time neces- 
sary for a journey, or to arrest the tides. Such 
vestiges of the primitive mode of thought linger in 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 49 

the more intricate departments of sciences which 
have attained a high degree of positive develop- 
ment. The metaphysical mode of explanation, 
being less antagonistic than the theological to the 
idea of invariable laws, is still slower in being en- 
tirely discarded. M. Comte finds remains of it in 
the sciences which are the most completely 
positive, with the single exception of astronomy, 
mathematics itself not being, he thinks, altogether 
free from them : which is not wonderful, when we 
see at how very recent a date mathematicians have 
been able to give the really positive interpretation 
of their own symbols.* We have already however 
had occasion to notice M. Comte's propensity to 
use the term metaphysical in cases containing 
nothing that truly answers to his definition of the 
word. Eor instance, he considers chemistry as 
tainted with the metaphysical mode of thought by 
the notion of chemical affinity. He thinks that 
the chemists who said that bodies combine because 
they have an aninity for each other, believed in a 
mysterious entity residing in bodies and inducing 
them to combine. On any other supposition, he 
thinks the statement could only mean that bodies 
combine because they combine. But it really 
meant more. It was the abstract expression of 
the doctrine, that bodies have an invariable tend- 
ency to combine with one thing in preference to 

* We refer particularly to the mystical metaphysics connected 
with the negative sign, imaginary quantities, infinity and infinitesi- 
mals, &c, all cleared up and put on a rational footing in the highly 
philosophical treatises of Professor De Morgan. 

4 



50 AUGTUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

another : that the tendencies of different sub- 
stances to combine are fixed quantities, of which 
the greater always prevails over the less, so that if 
A detaches B from C in one case it will do so in 
every other ; which was called having a greater 
attraction, or, more technically, a greater affinity 
for it. This was not a metaphysical theory, but a 
positive generalization, which accounted for a 
great number of facts, and would have kept its 
place as a law of nature, had it not been disproved 
by the discovery of cases in which though A de- 
tached B from C in some circumstances, G de- 
tached it from A in others, showing the law of 
elective chemical combination to be a less simple 
one than had at first been supposed. In this case, 
therefore, M. Comte made a mistake : and he will 
be found to have made many similar ones. But in 
the science next after chemistry, biology, the 
empty mode of explanation by scholastic entities, 
such as a plastic force, a vital principle, and the 
like, has been kept up even to the present day. 
The German physiology of the school of Oken, 
notwithstanding his acknowledged genius, is al- 
most as metaphysical as Hegel, and there is in 
Erance a quite recent revival of the Animism of 
Stalil. These metaphysical explanations, besides 
their inanity, did serious harm, by directing the 
course of positive scientific inquiry into wrong 
channels. There was indeed nothing to prevent 
investigating the mode of action of the supposed 
plastic or vital force by observation and experi- 
ment ; but the phrases gave currency and coher- 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 51 

ence to a false abstraction and generalization, set- 
ting inquirers to look out for one cause of complex 
phenomena which undoubtedly depended on many. 
According to M. Comte, chemistry entered into 
the positive stage with Lavoisier, in the latter half 
of the last century (in a subsequent treatise he 
places the date a generation earlier) ; and biology 
at the beginning of the present, when Bichat drew 
the fundamental distinction between nutritive or 
vegetative and properly animal life, and referred 
the properties of organs to the general laws of the 
component tissues. The most complex of all 
sciences, the Social, had not, he maintained, be- 
come positive at all, but was the subject of an 
ever-renewed and barren contest between the theo- 
logical and the metaphysical modes of thought. To 
make this highest of the sciences positive, and 
thereby complete the positive character of all 
human speculations, was the principal aim of his 
labours, and he believed himself to have accom- 
plished it in the last three volumes of his Treatise. 
But the term Positive is not, any more than Meta- 
physical, always used by M. Comte in the same 
meaning. There never can have been a period in 
any science when it was not in some degree posi- 
tive, since it always professed to draw conclusions 
from experience and observation. M. Comte would 
have been the last to deny that previous to his own 
speculations, the world possessed a multitude of 
truths, of greater or less certainty, on social sub- 
jects, the evidence of which was obtained by in- 
ductive or deductive processes from observed se- 

4 * 



52 ATJGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

quences of phenomena. Nor could it be denied 
that the best writers on subjects upon which so 
many men of the highest mental capacity had em- 
ployed their powers, had accepted as thoroughly 
the positive point of view, and rejected the theo- 
logical and metaphysical as decidedly, as M. Comte 
himself. Montesquieu ; even Macchiavelli ; Adam 
Smith and the political economists universally, 
both in Prance and in England ; Bentham, and all 
thinkers initiated by him, — had a full conviction 
that social phenomena conform to invariable laws, 
the discovery and illustration of which was their 
great object as speculative thinkers. All that can 
be said is, that those philosophers did not get so 
far as M. Comte in discovering the methods best 
adapted to bring these laws to light. It was not, 
therefore, reserved for M. Comte to make socio- 
logical inquiries positive. But what he really 
meant by making a science positive, is what we 
will call, with M. Littre, giving it its final scien- 
tific constitution ; in other words, discovering or 
proving, and pursuing to their consequences, those 
of its truths which are fit to form the connecting 
links among the rest : truths which are to it what 
the law of gravitation is to astronomy, what the 
elementary properties of the tissues are to physio- 
logy, and we will add (though M. Comte did not) 
what the laws of association are to psychology. 
This is an operation which, when accomplished, 
puts an end to the empirical period, and enables 
the science to be conceived as a co-ordinated and 
coherent body of doctrine. This is what had not 



ATTGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 53 

yet been done for sociology ; and the hope of effect- 
ing it was, from his early years, the prompter and 
incentive of all M. Comte's philosophic labours. 

It was with a view to this that he undertook 
that wonderful systematization of the philosophy of 
all the antecedent sciences, from mathematics to 
physiology, which, if we had done nothing else, 
would have stamped him, in all minds competent 
to appreciate it, as one of the principal thinkers of 
the age. To make its nature intelligible to those 
who are not acquainted with it, we must explain 
what we mean by the philosophy of a science, as 
distinguished from the science itself. The proper 
meaning of philosophy we take to be, what the 
ancients understood by it — the scientific knowledge 
of Man, as an intellectual, moral, and social being. 
Since his intellectual faculties include his knowing 
faculty, the science of Man includes everything 
that man can know, so far as regards his mode of 
knowing it : in other words, the whole doctrine of 
the conditions of human knowledge. The philoso- 
phy of a Science thus comes to mean the science 
itself, considered not as to its results, the truths 
which it ascertains, but as to the processes by 
which the mind attains them, the marks by which 
it recognises them, and the co-ordinating and 
methodizing of them with a view to the greatest 
clearness of conception and the fullest and readiest 
availibility for use : in one word, the logic of the 
science. M. Comte has accomplished this for the 
first five of the fundamental sciences, with a suc- 
cess which can hardlv be too much admired. We 



54 AUGUSTE COMTB AND POSITIVISM. 

never reopen even the least admirable part of this 
survey, the volume on chemistry and biology 
(which was behind the actual state of those sciences 
when first written, and is far in the rear of them 
now), without a renewed sense of the great reach 
of its speculations, and a conviction that the 
way to a complete rationalizing of those sciences, 
still very imperfectly conceived by most who 
cultivate them, has been shown nowhere so success- 
fully as there. 

Yet, for a correct appreciation of this great 
philosophical achievement, we ought to take ac- 
count of what has not been accomplished, as well 
as of what has. Some of the chief deficiencies and 
infirmities of M. Comte's system of thought will be 
found, as is usually the case, in close connexion 
with its greatest successes. 

The philosophy of Science consists of two prin- 
cipal parts ; the methods of investigation, and the 
requisites of proof. The one points out the roads 
by which the human intellect arrives at conclu- 
sions, the other the mode of testing their evidence. 
The former if complete would be an Organon of 
Discovery, the latter of Proof. It is to the first of 
these that M. Comte principally confines himself, 
and he treats it with a degree of perfection hitherto 
unrivalled. Nowhere is there anything comparable, 
in its kind, to his survey of the resources which 
the mind has at its disposal for investigating the 
laws of phsenomena ; the circumstances which 
render each of the fundamental modes of explora- 
tion suitable or unsuitable to each class of phaeno- 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 55 

mena ; the extensions and transformations which 
the process of investigation has to undergo in 
adapting itself to each new province of the field of 
study ; and the especial gifts with which every one 
of the fundamental sciences enriches the method of 
positive inquiry, each science in its turn being the 
best fitted to bring to perfection one process or 
another. These, and many cognate subjects, such 
as the theory of Classification, and the proper use 
of scientific Hypotheses, M. Comte has treated with 
a completeness of insight which leaves little to be 
desired. Not less admirable is his survey of the 
mosfc comprehensive truths that had been arrived 
at by each science, considered as to their relation 
to the general sum of human knowledge, and their 
logical value as aids to its further progress. But 
after all this, there remains a further and distinct 
question. We are taught the right way of search- 
ing for results, but when a result has been reached, 
how shall we know that it is true ? How assure 
ourselves that the process has been performed cor- 
rectly, and that our premises, whether consisting of 
generalities or of particular facts, really prove the 
conclusion we have grounded on them ? On this 
question M. Comte throws no light. He supplies 
no test of proof. As regards deduction, he neither 
recognises the syllogistic system of Aristotle and 
his successors (the insufficiency of which is as 
evident as its utility is real) nor proposes any 
other in lieu of it : and of induction he has no 
canons whatever. He does not seem to admit the 
possibility of any general criterion by which to 



56 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

decide whether a given inductive inference is cor- 
rect or not. Yet he does not, with Dr Whewell, 
regard an inductive theory as proved if it accounts 
for the facts : on the contrary, he sets himself in 
the strongest opposition to those scientific hypo- 
theses which, like the luminiferous ether, are not 
susceptible of direct proof, and are accepted on the 
sole evidence of their aptitude for explaining 
phsenomena. He maintains that no hypothesis is 
legitimate unless it is susceptible of verification, 
and that none ought to be accepted as true unless 
it can be shown not only that it accords with the 
facts, but that its falsehood would be inconsistent 
with them. He therefore needs a test of inductive 
proof ; and in assigning none, he seems to give up 
as impracticable the main problem of Logic pro- 
perly so called. At the beginning of his treatise 
he speaks of a doctrine of Method, apart from 
particular applications, as conceivable, but not 
needful : method, according to him, is learnt only 
by seeing it in operation, and the logic of a science 
can only usefully be taught through the science 
itself. Towards the end of the work, he assumes a 
more decidedly negative tone, and treats the very 
conception of studying Logic otherwise than in its 
applications as chimerical. He got on, in his sub- 
sequent writings, to considering it as wrong. This 
indispensable part of Positive Philosophy he not 
only left to be supplied by others, but did all that 
depended on him to discourage them from attempt- 
ing it. 

This hiatus in M. Comte's system is not uncon- 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 57 

nected with, a defect in his original conception of 
the subject matter of scientific investigation, which 
has been generally noticed, for it lies on the sur- 
face, and is more apt to be exaggerated than over- 
looked. It is often said of him that he rejects the 
study of causes. This is not, in the correct accept- 
ation, true, for it is only questions of ultimate 
origin, and of Efficient as distinguished from what 
are called Physical causes, that he rejects. The 
causes that he regards as inaccessible are causes 
which are not themselves phenomena. Like other 
people he admits the study of causes, in every sense 
in which one physical fact can be the cause of 
another. But he has an objection to the word 
cause ; he will only consent to speak of Laws of 
Succession : and depriving himself of the use of a 
word which has a Positive meaning, he misses the 
meaning it expresses. He sees no difference be- 
tween such generalizations as Kepler's laws, and 
such as the theory of gravitation. He fails to per- 
ceive the real distinction between the laws of suc- 
cession and coexistence which thinkers of a different 
school call Laws of Phaenomena, and those of what 
they call the action of Causes : the former exempli- 
fied by the succession of day and night, the latter 
by the earth's rotation which causes it. The suc- 
cession of day and night is as much an invariable 
sequence, as the alternate exposure of opposite sides 
of the earth to the sun. Yet day and night are not 
the causes of one another ; why ? Because their 
sequence, though invariable in our experience, is 
not unconditionally so : those facts only succeed 



58 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

each other, provided that the presence and absence 
of the snn succeed each other, and if this alternation 
were to cease, we might have either day or night 
unfollowed by one another. There are thus two 
kinds of uniformities of succession, the one uncon- 
ditional, the other conditional on the first : laws of 
causation, and other successions dependent on those 
laws. All ultimate laws are laws of causation, and 
the only universal law beyond the pale of mathe- 
matics is the law of universal causation, namely, 
that every phenomenon has a phenomenal cause ; 
has some phenomenon other than itself, or some 
combination of phenomena, on which it is invaria- 
bly and unconditionally consequent. It is on the 
universality of this law that the possibility rests of 
establishing a canon of Induction. A general pro- 
position inductively obtained is only then proved to 
be true, when the instances on which it rests are 
such that if they have been correctly observed, the 
falsity of the generalization would be inconsistent 
with the constancy of causation ; with the univer- 
sality of the fact that the phenomena of nature 
take place according to invariable laws of succes- 
sion.* It is probable, therefore, that M. Comte's 
determined abstinence from the word and the idea 

# Those who wish to see this idea followed out, are referred to " A 
System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive." It is not irrelevant to 
state that M. Corate, soon after the publication of that work, expressed, 
both in a letter (published in M. Littre's volume) and in print, his high 
approval of it (especially of the Inductive part) as a real contribution 
to the construction of the Positive Method. But we cannot discover 
that he was indebted to it for a single idea, or that it influenced, 
in the smallest particular, the course of his subsequent speculations. 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 59 

of Cause, had much to do with his inability to 
conceive an Inductive Logic, by diverting his 
attention from the only basis upon which it could 
be founded. 

We are afraid it must also be said, though 
shown only by slight indications in his fundament- 
al work, and coming out in full evidence only in 
his later writings — that M. Comte, at bottom, was 
not so solicitous about completeness of proof as 
becomes a positive philosopher, and that the un- 
impeachable objectivity, as he would have -called 
it, of a conception — its exact correspondence to the 
realities of outward fact — was not, with him, an 
indispensable condition of adopting it, if it was 
subjectively useful, by affording facilities to the 
mind for grouping phenomena. This appears very 
curiously in his chapters on the philosophy of Che- 
mistry. He recommends, as a judicious use of 
" the degree of liberty left to our intelligence by 
the end and purpose of positive science," that we 
should accept as a convenient generalization the 
doctrine that all chemical composition is between 
two elements only ; that every substance which 
our analysis decomposes, let us say into four ele- 
ments, has for its immediate constituents two 
hypothetical substances, each compounded of two 
simpler ones. There would have been nothing to 
object to in this as a scientific hypothesis, assumed 
tentatively as a means of suggesting experiments 
by which its truth may be tested. With this for 
its destination, the conception would have been 
legitimate and philosophical ; the more so, as, if 



60 AUGTTSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

confirmed, it would have afforded an explanation 
of the fact that some substances which analysis 
shows to be composed of the same elementary sub- 
stances in the same proportions, differ in their 
general properties, as for instance, sugar and gum.* 
And if, besides affording a reason for difference 
between things which differ, the hypothesis had 
afforded a reason for agreement between things 
which agree; if the intermediate link by which 
the quaternary compound was resolved into two 
binary ones, could have been so chosen as to bring 
each of them within the. analogies of some known 
class of binary compounds (which it is easy to sup- 
pose possible, and which in some particular in- 
stances actually happens) ; f the universality of 
binary composition would have been a successful 
example of an hypothesis in anticipation of a posi- 
tive theory, to give a direction to inquiry which 
might end in its being either proved or aban- 
doned. But M. Comte evidently thought that 
even though it should never be proved — however 
many cases of chemical composition might always 
remain in which the theory was still as hypotheti- 

* The force, however, of this last consideration has been much 
weakened by the progress of discovery since M. Comte left off studying 
chemistry ; it being now probable that most if not all substances, 
even elementary, are susceptible of allotropic forms ; as in the case of 
oxygen and ozone, the two forms of phosphorus, &c. 

f Thus ; by considering prussic acid as a compound of hydrogen 
and cyanogen rather than of hydrogen and the elements of cyanogen 
(carbon and nitrogen), it is assimilated to a whole class of acid com- 
pounds between hydrogen and other substances, and a reason is thus 
found for its agreeing in their acid properties. 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 61 

cal as at first — so long as it was not actually dis- 
proved (which it is scarcely in the nature of the 
case that it should ever be) it would deserve to be 
retained, for its mere convenience in bringing a 
large body of phenomena under a general concep- 
tion. In a resume of the general principles of the 
positive method at the end of the work, he claims, 
in express terms, an unlimited license of adopting 
" without any vain scruple" hypothetical concep- 
tions of this sort ; " in order to satisfy, within pro- 
per limits, our just mental inclinations, which al- 
ways turn, with an instinctive predilection, towards 
simplicity, continuity, and generality of concep- 
tions, while always respecting the reality of exter- 
nal laws in so far as accessible to us" (vi. 639). 
" The most philosophic point of view leads us to 
conceive the study of natural laws as destined to 
represent the external world so as to give as much 
satisfaction to the essential inclinations of our intel- 
ligence, as is consistent with the degree of exacti- 
tude commanded by the aggregate of our practical 
wants" (vi. 642). Among these " essential inclina- 
tions " he includes not only our " instinctive 
predilection for order and harmony," which makes 
us relish any conception, even fictitious, that helps 
to reduce phenomena to system ; but even our 
feelings of taste, " les convenances purement esthe- 
tiques," which, he says, have a legitimate part in 
the employment of the " genre de liberty reste' 
facultatif pour notre intelligence." After the due 
satisfaction of our " most eminent mental inclina- 
tions," there will still remain "a considerable mar- 



62 ATJGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

gin of mdeterminateness, which should be made use 
of to give a direct gratification to our besoin of ideal- 
ity, by embellishing our scientific thoughts, with- 
out injury to their essential reality " (vi. 647). In 
consistency with all this, M. Comte warns thinkers 
against too severe a scrutiny of the exact truth of 
scientific laws, and stamps with " severe reproba- 
tion" those who break down "by too minute an 
investigation " generalizations already made, with- 
out being able to substitute others (vi. 639) : as in 
the case of Lavoisier's general theory of chemistry, 
which would have made that science more satisfac- 
tory than at present to " the instinctive inclina- 
tions of our intelligence " if it had turned out true, 
but unhappily it did not. These mental disposi- 
tions in M. Comte account for his not having found 
or sought a logical criterion of proof ; but they are 
scarcely consistent with his inveterate hostility to 
the hypothesis of the luminiferous ether, which 
certainly gratifies our " predilection for order and 
harmony," not to say our " besoin d'id^aliteV' in 
no ordinary degree. This notion of the " destina- 
tion " of the study of natural laws is to our minds 
a complete dereliction of the essential principles 
which form the Positive conception of science ; and 
contained the germ of the perversion of his own 
philosophy which marked his later years. It might 
be interesting, but scarcely worth while, to attempt 
to penetrate to the just thought which misled M. 
Comte, for there is almost always a grain of truth 
in the errors of an original and powerful mind. 
There is another grave aberration in M. Comte' s 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. Go 

view of the method of positive science, which though 
not more unphilosophical than the last mentioned, 
is of greater practical importance. He rejects 
totally, as an invalid process, psychological observ- 
ation properly so called, or in other words, inter- 
nal consciousness, at least as regards our intel- 
lectual operations. He gives no place in his series 
of the science of Psychology, and always speaks of 
it with contempt. The study of mental phsenomena, 
or, as he expresses it, of moral and intellectual 
functions, has a place in his scheme, under the 
head of Biology, but only as a branch of physio- 
logy. Our knowledge of the human mind must, 
he thinks, be acquired by observing other people. 
How we are to observe other people's mental opera- 
tions, or how interpret the signs of them without 
having learnt what the signs mean by knowledge 
of ourselves, he does not state. But it is clear to 
him that we can learn very little about the feelings, 
and nothing at all about the intellect, by self-ob- 
servation. Our intelligence can observe all other 
things, but not itself : we cannot observe ourselves 
observing, or observe ourselves reasoning : and if 
we could, attention to this reflex operation would 
annihilate its object, by stopping the process ob- 
served. 

There is little need for an elaborate refutation 
of a fallacy respecting which the only wonder is 
that it should impose on any one. Two answers 
may be given to it. In the first place, M. Comte 
might be referred to experience, and to the writ- 
ings of his countryman M. Cardaillac and our 



6Jd ATJGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

own Sir William Hamilton, for proof that the 
mind can not only be conscious of, but attend to, 
more than one, and even a considerable number, 
of impressions at once.* It is true that attention 
is weakened by bein^ divided; and this forms a 
special difficulty in psychological observation, as 
psychologists (Sir TTilliam Hamilton in particular) 
have fully recognised ; but a difficulty is not an 
impossibility. Secondly, it might have occurred 
to M. Comte that a fact may be studied through 
the medium of memory, not at the very moment of 
our perceiving it, but the moment after : and this 
is really the mode in which our best knowledge of 
our intellectual acts is generally acquired. TTe 
reflect on what we have been doing, when the act 
is past, but when its impression in the memory is 
still fresh. Unless in one of these ways, we could 
not have acquired the knowledge, which nobody 
denies us to have, of what passes in our minds. 
M. Comte would scarcely have affirmed that we 
are not aware of our own intellectual operations. 
"We know of our observings and our reasonings, 
either at the very time, or by memory the moment 
after ; in either case, by direct knowledge, and not 
(like things done by us in a state of somnambu- 
lism) merely by their results. This simple fact 
destroys the whole of M. Comte's argument. 
Whatever we are directly aware of, we can direct- 
ly observe. 

8 According to Sir William Hamilton, as many as six ; but nu- 
merical precision in sucli matters is out of the question, and it is pro- 
bable that different minds have the power in different degrees. 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 65 

And what Organon for the study of " the 
moral and intellectual functions " does M. Comte 
offer, in lieu of the direct mental observation 
which he repudiates ? We are almost ashamed to 
say, that it is Phrenology ! Not, indeed, he says, 
as a science formed, but as one still to be created ; 
for he rejects almost all the special organs ima- 
gined by phrenologists, and accepts only their 
general division of the brain into the three regions 
of the propensities, the sentiments, and the intel- 
lect,* and the subdivision of the latter region be- 
tween the organs of meditation and those of observ- 
ation. Yet this mere first outline pf an appor- 
tionment of the mental functions among different 
organs, he regards as extricating the mental study 
of man from the metaphysical stage, and elevating 
it to the positive. The condition of mental science 
would be sad indeed if this were its best chance of 
being positive ; for the later course of physiologi- 
cal observation and speculation has not tended to 
confirm, but to discredit, the phrenological hypo- 
thesis. And even if that hypothesis were true, 
psychological observation would still be necessary ; 
for how is it possible to ascertain the correspond- 
ence between two things, by observation of only 
one of them ? To establish a relation between 
mental functions and cerebral conformations, re- 
quires not only a parallel system of observations 
applied to each, but (as M. Comte himself, with 

* Or, as afterwards corrected by him, the appetites and emotions, 
the active capacities, and the intellectual faculties ; " le coeur," " le 
caractere," and " l'esprit." 



66 ATJGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

some inconsistency, acknowledges) an analysis of 
the mental faculties, " des diverses faculty 616- 
mentaires," (iii. 573), conducted without any refer- 
ence to the physical conditions, since the proof of 
the theory would lie in the correspondence be- 
tween the division of the brain into organs and 
that of the mind into faculties, each shown by 
separate evidence. To accomplish this analysis 
requires direct psychological study carried to a 
high pitch of perfection ; it being necessary, 
among other things, to investigate the degree in 
which mental character is created by circum- 
stances, since no one supposes that cerebral con- 
formation does all, and circumstances nothing. 
The phrenological study of Mind thus supposes as 
its necessary preparation the whole of the Associa- 
tion psychology. Without, then, rejecting any 
aid which study of the brain and nerves can afford 
to psychology (and it has afforded, and will yet 
afford, much), we may affirm that M. Comte has 
done nothing for the constitution of the positive 
method of mental science. He refused to profit 
by the very valuable commencements made by his 
predecessors, especially by Hartley, Brown, and 
James Mill (if indeed any of those philosophers 
were known to him), and left the psychological 
branch of the positive method, as well as psycho- 
logy itself, to be put in their true position as a 
part of Positive Philosophy by successors who duly 
placed themselves at the twofold point of view of 
physiology and psychology, Mr Bain and Mr 
Herbert Spencer. This great mistake is not a 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 67 

mere hiatus in M. Oomte's system, but the parent 
of serious errors in his attempt to create a Social 
Science. He is indeed very skilful in estimating 
the effect of circumstances in moulding the gen- 
eral character of the human race ; were he not, 
his historical theory could be of little worth : but 
in appreciating the influence which circumstances 
exercise, through psychological laws, in producing 
diversities of character, collective or individual, he 
is sadly at fault. 

After this summary view of M. Comte's con- 
ception of Positive Philosophy, it remains to give 
some account of his more special and equally am- 
bitious attempt to create the Science of Sociology, 
or, as he expresses it, to elevate the study of social 
phenomena to the positive state. 

He regarded all who profess any political opin- 
ions as hitherto divided between the adherents of the 
theological and those of the metaphysical mode of 
thought : the former deducing all their doctrines 
from divine ordinances, the latter from abstractions. 
This assertion, however, cannot be intended in the 
same sense as when the terms are applied to the 
sciences of inorganic nature ; for it is impossible 
that acts evidently proceeding from the human 
will could be ascribed to the agency (at least im- 
mediate) of either divinities or abstractions. No 
one ever regarded himself or his fellow-man as a 
mere piece of machinery worked by a god, or as 
the abode of an entity which was the true author of 
what the man himself appeared to do. True, it 
was believed that the gods, or God, could move or 



68 ATTCUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

change human wills, as well as control their conse- 
quences, and prayers were offered to them accord- 
ingly, rather as able to overrule the spontaneous 
course of things, than as at each instant carrying 
it on. On the whole, however, the theological and 
metaphysical conceptions, in their application to 
sociology, had reference not to the production of 
phenomena, but to the rule of duty, and conduct 
in life. It is this w T hich was based, either on a 
divine will, or on abstract mental conceptions, 
which, by an illusion of the rational faculty, were 
invested with objective validity. On the one hand, 
the established rules of morality were everywhere 
referred to a divine origin. In the majority of 
countries the entire civil and criminal law was 
looked upon as revealed from above ; and itjisjto 
the petty military communities which escaped this 
delusion, that man is indebted for being now a pro- 
gressive being. The fundamental institutions of 
the state were almost everywhere believed to have 
been divinely established, and to be still, in a 
greater or less degree, of divine authority. The 
divine right of certain lines of kings to rule, and 
even to rule absolutely, was but lately the creed of 
the dominant party in most countries of Europe ; 
while the divine right of popes and bishops to 
dictate men's beliefs (and not respecting the invisi- 
ble world alone) is still striving, though under con- 
siderable difficulties, to rule mankind. When these 
opinions began to be out of date, a rival theory 
presented itself to take their place. There were, in 
truth, many such theories, and to some of them the 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. G9 

term metaphysical, in M. Comte's sense, cannot 
justly be applied. All theories in which the ulti- 
mate standard of institutions and rules of action 
was the happiness of mankind, and observation and 
experience the guides (and some such there have 
been in all periods of free speculation), are entitled 
to the name Positive, whatever, in other respects, 
their imperfections may be. But these were a 
small minority. M. Comte was right in affirming 
that the prevailing schools of moral and political 
speculation, when not theological, have been meta- 
physical. They affirmed that moral rules, and even 
political institutions, were not means to an end, 
the general good, but corollaries evolved from the 
conception of Natural Eights. This was especially 
the case in all the countries in which the ideas of 
publicists were the offspring of the Uoman Law. 
The legislators of opinion on these subjects, when 
not theologians, were lawyers : and the Continental 
lawyers followed the Roman jurists, who followed 
the Greek metaphysicians, in acknowledging as the 
ultimate source of right and wrong in morals, and 
consequently in institutions, the imaginary law of 
the imaginary being Nature. The first system- 
atizers of morals in Christian Europe, on any other 
than a purely theological basis, the writers on In- 
ternational Law, reasoned wholly from these pre- 
mises, and transmitted them to a long line of 
successors. This mode of thought reached its cul- 
mination in Rousseau, in whose hands it became as 
powerful an instrument for destroying the past, as 
it was impotent for directing the future. The com- 



70 AUGUSTS COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

plete victory which this philosophy gained, in 
speculation, over the old doctrines, was temporarily 
followed hy an equally complete practical triumph, 
the French Revolution : when, having had, for the 
first time, a full opportunity of developing its tend- 
encies, and showing what it could not do, it failed 
so conspicuously as to determine a partial reaction 
to the doctrines of feudalism and Catholicism. 
Between these and the political metaphysics (meta- 
politics as Coleridge called it) of the Revolution, 
society has since oscillated ; raising up in the pro- 
cess a hybrid intermediate party, termed Conserva- 
tive, or the party of Order, which has no doctrines 
of its own, but attempts to hold the scales even 
between the two others, borrowing alternately the 
arguments of each, to use as weapons against 
whichever of the two seems at the moment most 
likely to prevail. 

Such, reduced to a very condensed form, is M. 
Comte's version of the state of European opinion 
on politics and society. An Englishman's criticism 
would-be, that it describes well enough the general 
division of political opinion in Erance and the 
countries which follow her lead, but not in Eng- 
land, or the communities of English origin : in all 
of which, divine right died out with the Jacobites, 
and the law of nature and natural rights have 
never been favourites even with the extreme popu- 
lar party, who preferred to rest their claims on the 
historical traditions of their own country, and on 
maxims drawn from its law books, and since they 
outgrew this standard, almost always base them on 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 71 

general expediency. In England, the preference 
of one form of government to another seldom turns 
on anything but the practical consequences which 
it produces, or which are expected from it. M. 
Comte can point to little of the nature of metaphy- 
sics in English politics, except "la inetaphysique 
constitutionnelle," a name he chooses to give to the 
conventional fiction by which the occupant of the 
throne is supposed to be the source from whence 
all power emanates, while nothing can be further 
from the belief or intention of anybody than that 
such should really be the case. Apart from this, 
which is a matter of forms and words, and has no 
connexion with any belief except belief in the pro- 
prieties, the severest criticism can find nothing 
either worse or better, in the modes of thinking 
either of our conservative or of our liberal party, than 
a particularly shallow and flimsy kind of positivism. 
The working classes indeed, or some portion of 
them, perhaps still rest their claim to universal 
suffrage on abstract right, in addition to more sub- 
stantial reasons, and thus far and no farther does 
metaphysics prevail in the region of English poli- 
tics. But politics is not the entire art of social 
existence : ethics is a still deeper and more vital 
part of it : and in that, as much in England as else- 
where, the current opinions are still divided be- 
tween the theological mode of thought and the 
metaphysical. What is the whole doctrine of In- 
tuitive Morality, which reigns supreme wherever 
the idolatry of Scripture texts has abated and the 
influence of Bentham's philosophy has not reached, 



72 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

but the metaphysical state of ethical science ? 
What else, indeed, is the whole a priori philosophy, 
in morals, jurisprudence, psychology, logic, even 
physical science, for it does not always keep its 
hands off that, the oldest domain of observation 
and experiment ? It has the universal diagnostic of 
the metaphysical mode of thought, in the Comtean 
sense of the word ; that of erecting a mere creation 
of the mind into a test or norma of external truth, 
and presenting the abstract expression of the beliefs 
already entertained, as the reason and evidence 
which justifies them. Of those who still adhere to 
the old opinions we need not speak ; but when one 
of the most vigorous as well as boldest thinkers 
that English speculation has yet produced, full of 
the true scientific spirit, Mr Herbert Spencer, 
places in the front of his philosophy the doctrine 
that the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition 
is the inconceivableness of its negative ; when, fol- 
lowing in the steps of Mr Spencer, an able ex- 
pounder of positive philosophy like Mr Lewes, in 
his meritorious and by no means superficial work 
on Aristotle, after laying, very justly, the blame of 
almost every error of the ancient thinkers on their 
neglecting to verify their opinions, announces that 
there are two kinds of verification, the Ileal and the 
Ideal, the ideal test of truth being that its negative 
is unthinkable, and by the application of that test 
judges that gravitation must be universal even in 
the stellar regions, because in the absence of proof 
to the contrary, " the idea of matter without gravity 
is unthinkable ; " — when those from whom it was 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 73 

least to be expected thus set up acquired necessities 
of thought in the minds of one or two generations 
as evidence of real necessities in the universe, 
we must admit that the metaphysical mode of 
thought still rules the higher philosophy, even in 
the department of inorganic nature, and far more 
in all that relates to man as a moral, intellectual, 
and social being. 

But, while M. Comte is so far in the right, we 
often, as already intimated, find him using the 
name metaphysical to denote certain practical 
conclusions, instead of a particular kind of theore- 
tical premises. Whatever goes by the different 
names of the revolutionary, the radical, the demo- 
cratic, the liberal, the free-thinking, the sceptical, 
or the negative and critical school or party in 
religion, politics, or philosophy, all passes with 
him under the designation of metaphysical, and 
whatever he has to say about it forms part of his 
description of the metaphysical school of social 
science. He passes in review, one after another, 
what he deems the leading doctrines of the revolu- 
tionary school of politics, and dismisses them all 
as mere instruments of attack upon the old social 
system, with no permanent validity as social truth. 

He assigns only this humble rank to the 
first of all the articles of the liberal creed, 
" the absolute right of free examination, or the 
dogma of unlimited liberty of conscience." As 
far as this doctrine only means that opinions, 
and their expression, should be exempt from 
legal restraint, either in the form of prevention 



74 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

or of penalty, M. Comte is a firm adherent of 
it : but the moral right of every human being, 
however ill-prepared by the necessary instruction 
and discipline, to erect himself into a judge of 
the most intricate as well as the most important 
questions that can occupy the human intellect, 
he resolutely denies. " There is no liberty of 
conscience," he said in an early work, " in as- 
tronomy, in physics, in chemistry, even in physio- 
logy, in the sense that every one would think 
it absurd not to accept in confidence the principles 
established in those sciences by the competent 
persons. If it is otherwise in politics, the reason 
is merely because, the old doctrines having gone 
by and the new ones not being yet formed, there 
are not properly, during the interval, any estab- 
lished opinions." When first mankind outgrew 
the old doctrines, an appeal from doctors and 
teachers to the outside public was inevitable and 
indispensable, since without the toleration and 
encouragement of discussion and criticism from 
all quarters, it would have been impossible for any 
new doctrines to grow up. But in itself, the 
practice of carrying the questions which more 
than all others require special knowledge and 
preparation, before the incompetent tribunal of 
common opinion, is, he contends, radically irra- 
tional, and will and ought to cease when once 
mankind have again made up their minds to a 
system of doctrine. The prolongation of this pro- 
visional state, producing an ever-increasing diver- 
gence of opinions, is already, according to him, 



AUGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 75 

extremely dangerous, since it is only when there 
is a tolerable unanimity respecting the rule of life, 
that a real moral control can be established over 
the self-interest and passions of individuals. Besides 
which, when every man is encouraged to believe 
himself a competent judge of the most difficult 
social questions, he cannot be prevented from 
thinking himself competent also to the most im- 
portant public duties, and the baneful competition 
for power and official functions spreads constantly 
downwards to a lower and lower grade of intelli- 
gence. In M. Comte's opinion, the peculiarly 
complicated nature of sociological studies, and the 
great amount of previous knowledge and intel- 
lectual discipline requisite for them, together with 
the serious consequences that may be produced by 
even temporary errors on such subjects, render 
it necessary in the case of ethics and politics, still 
more than of mathematics and physics, that what- 
ever legal liberty may exist of questioning and 
discussing, the opinions of mankind should really 
be formed for them by an exceedingly small 
number of minds of the highest class, trained to 
the task by the most thorough and laborious 
mental preparation : and that the questioning of 
their conclusions by any one, not of an equivalent 
grade of intellect and instruction, should be ac- 
counted equally presumptuous, and more blamable, 
than the attempts occasionally made by sciolists to 
refute the Newtonian astronomy. All this is, in a 
sense, true : but we confess our sympathy with 
those who feel towards it like the man in the story, 



76 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

who being asked whether he admitted that six and 
five make eleven, refused to give an answer until 
he knew what use was to be made of it. The 
doctrine is one of a class of truths which, unless 
completed by other truths, are so liable to perver- 
sion, that we may fairly decline to take notice of 
them except in connexion with some definite 
application. In justice to M. Comte it should 
be said that he does not wish this intellectual 
dominion to be exercised over an ignorant people. 
Par from him is the thought of promoting the 
allegiance of the mass to scientific authority by 
withholding from them scientific knowledge. He 
holds it the duty of society to bestow on every one 
who grows up to manhood or womanhood as com- 
plete a course of instruction in every department 
of science, from mathematics to sociology, as can 
possibly be made general : and his ideas of what is 
possible in that respect are carried to a length to 
which few are prepared to follow him. There 
is something startling, though, when closely looked 
into, not Utopian or chimerical, in the amount 
of positive knowledge of the most varied kind 
which he believes may, by good methods of teach- 
ing, be made the common inheritance of all 
persons with ordinary faculties who are born into 
the world : not the mere knowledge of results, to 
which, except for the practical arts, he attaches 
only secondary value, but knowledge also of the 
mode in which those results were attained, and the 
evidence on which they rest, so far as it can be 



AUGUSTE CQMTE AND POSITIVISM. 77 

known and understood by those who do not devote 
their lives to its study. 

"We have stated thus fully M. Comte's opinion 
on the most fundamental doctrine of liberalism, be- 
cause it is the clue to much of his general concep- 
tion of politics. If his object had only been to 
exemplify by that doctrine the purely negative 
character of the principal liberal and revolutionary 
schools of thought, he need not have gone so far : 
it would have been enough to say, that the mere 
liberty to hold and express any creed, cannot itself 
be that creed. Every one is free to believe and 
publish that two and two make ten, but the import- 
ant thing is to know that they make four. M. 
Comte has no difficulty in making out an equally 
strong case against the other principal tenets of 
what he calls the revolutionary school ; since all 
that they generally amount to is, that something 
ought not to be : which cannot possibly be the whole 
truth, and which M. Comte, in general, will not 
admit to be even part of it. Take for instance the 
doctrine which denies to governments any initiative 
in social progress, restricting them to the function 
of preserving order, or in other words keeping the 
peace : an opinion which, so far as grounded on so- 
called rights of the individual, he justly regards as 
purely metaphysical ; but does not recognise that 
it is also widely held as an inference from the laws 
of human nature and human affairs, and there- 
fore, whether true or false, as a Positive doctrine. 
Believing with M. Comte that there are no absolute 



78 ATJGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

truths in the political art, nor indeed in any art 
whatever, we agree with him that the laisser faire 
doctrine, stated without large qualifications, is both 
unpractical and unscientific ; but it does not follow 
that those who assert it are not, nineteen times out 
of twenty, practically nearer the truth than those 
who deny it. The doctrine of Equality meets no 
better fate at M. Comte's hands. He regards it as 
the erection into an absolute dogma of a mere pro- 
test against the inequalities which came down from 
the middle ages, and answer no legitimate end in 
modern society. He observes, that mankind in a 
normal state, having to act together, are necessarily, 
in practice, organized and classed with some refer- 
ence to their unequal aptitudes, natural or acquired, 
which demand that some should be under the direc- 
tion of others : scrupulous regard being at the same 
time had to the fulfilment towards all, of "the 
claims rightfully inherent in the dignity of a human 
being ; the aggregate of which, still very insuffi- 
ciently appreciated, will constitute more and more 
the principle of universal morality as applied to 

daily use a grand moral obligation, which 

has never been directly denied since the aboli- 
tion of slavery" (iv. 54). There is not a word 
to be said against these doctrines : but the practical 
question is one which M. Comte never even enter- 
tains — viz., when, after being properly educated, 
people are left to find their places for themselves, 
do they not spontaneously class themselves in a 
manner much more conformable to their unequal 



ATJGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 79 

or dissimilar aptitudes, than governments or social 
institutions are likely to do it for them? The Sove- 
reignty of the People, again, — that metaphysical 
axiom which in Prance and the rest of the Con- 
tinent has so long been the theoretic basis of radi- 
cal and democratic politics, — he regards as of a 
purely negative character, signifying the right of 
the people to rid themselves by insurrection of a 
social order that has become oppressive; but, when 
erected into a positive principle of government, 
which condemns indefinitely all superiors to "an 
arbitrary dependence upon the multitude of their 
inferiors," he considers it as a sort of "transport- 
ation to peoples of the divine right so much re- 
proached to kings " (iv. 55, 56). On the doctrine 
as a metaphysical dogma or an absolute principle, 
this criticism is just ; but there is also a Positive 
doctrine, without any pretension to being absolute, 
which claims the direct participation of the govern- 
ed in their own government, not -as a natural right, 
but as a means to important ends, under the con- 
ditions and with the limitations which those ends 
impose. The general result of M. Comte's criticism 
on the revolutionary philosophy, is that he deems 
it not only incapable of aiding the necessary reor- 
ganization of society, but a serious impediment 
thereto, by setting up, on all the great interests of 
mankind, the mere negation of authority, direction, 
or organization, as the most perfect state, and the 
solution of all problems : the extreme point of this 
aberration being reached by Pousseau and his fol- 



80 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

lowers, when they extolled the savage state, as an 
ideal from which civilization was only a degeneracy, 
more or less marked and complete. 

The state of sociological speculation being such 
as has been described — divided between a feudal 
and theological school, now effete, and a demo- 
cratic and metaphysical one, of no value except 
for the destruction of the former ; the problem, 
how to render the social science positive, must 
naturally have presented itself, more or less dis- 
tinctly, to superior minds. M. Comte examines 
and criticises, for the most part justly, some of the 
principal efforts which have been made by indivi- 
dual thinkers for this purpose. But the weak side 
of his philosophy comes out prominently in his 
strictures on the only systematic attempt yet made 
by any body of thinkers, to constitute a science, 
not indeed of social phenomena generally, but of 
one great class or division of them. We mean, of 
course, political economy, which (with a reserva- 
tion in favour of the speculations of Adam Smith 
as valuable preparatory studies for science) he 
deems unscientific, unpositive, and a mere branch 
of metaphysics, that comprehensive category of 
condemnation in which he places all attempts at 
positive science which are not in his opinion di- 
rected by a right scientific method. Any one 
acquainted with the writings of political econo- 
mists need only read his few pages of animadver- 
sions on them (iv. 193 to 205), to learn how ex- 
tremely superficial M. Comte can sometimes be. 
He affirms that they have added nothing really 



AUGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 81 

new to the original apergus of Adam Smith ; when 
every one who has read them knows that they 
have added so much as to have changed the whole 
aspect of the science, besides rectifying and clear- 
ing up in the most essential points the apergus them- 
selves. He lays an almost puerile stress, for the 
purpose of disparagement, on the discussions about 
the meaning of words which are found in the best 
books on political economy, as if such discussions 
were not an indispensable accompaniment of the 
progress of thought, and abundant in the history 
of every physical science. On the whole question 
he has but one remark of any value, and that he 
misapplies ; namely, that the study of the condi- 
tions of national wealth as a detached subject is 
unphilosophical, because, all the different aspects 
of social phsenomena acting and reacting on one 
another, they cannot be rightly understood apart : 
which by no means proves that the material and 
industrial phenomena of society are not, even by 
themselves, susceptible of useful generalizations, 
but only that these generalizations must neces- 
sarily be relative to a given form of civilization 
and a given stage of social advancement. This, 
we apprehend, is what no political economist 
would deny. None of them pretend that the laws 
of wages, profits, values, prices, and the like, set 
down in their treatises, would be strictly true, or 
many of them true at all, in the savage state (for 
example), or in a community composed of masters 
and slaves. But they do think, with good reason, 
that whoever understands the political economy 



82 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

of a country with the complicated and manifold 
civilization of the nations of Europe, can deduce 
without difficulty the political economy of any 
other state of society, with the particular circum- 
stances of which he is equally well acquainted.* 
We do not pretend that political economy has 
never been prosecuted or taught in a contracted 
spirit. As often as a study is cultivated by nar- 
row minds, they will draw from it narrow conclu- 
sions. If a political economist is deficient in 
general knowledge, he will exaggerate the import- 
ance and universality of the limited class of truths 
which he knows. All kinds of scientific men are 
liable to this imputation, and M. Comte is never 
weary of urging it against them ; reproaching them 
with their narrowness of mind, the petty scale of 
their thoughts, their incapacity for large views, 
and the stupidity of those they occasionally at- 
tempt beyond the bounds of their own subjects. 
Political economists do not deserve these reproaches 
more than other classes of positive inquirers, but 
less than most. The principal error of narrowness 

M. Littre, who, though a warm admirer, and accepting the posi- 
tion of a disciple of M. Comte, is singularly free from his errors, makes 
the equally ingenious and just remark, that Political Economy corre- 
sponds in social science to the theory of the nutritive functions in 
biology, which M. Comte, with all good physiologists, thinks it not 
only permissible but a great and fundamental improvement to treat, 
in the first place, separately, as the necessary basis of the higher 
branches of the science : although the nutritive functions can no more 
be withdrawn in fact from the influence of the animal and human 
attributes, than the economical phenomena of society from that of the 
political and moral. 



AUGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 83 

with which they are frequently chargeable, is that 
of regarding, not any economical doctrine, but 
their present experience of mankind, as of univers- 
al validity ; mistaking temporary or local phases 
of human character for human nature itself ; hav- 
ing no faith in the wonderful pliability of the 
human mind ; deeming it impossible, in spite of 
the strongest evidence, that the earth can produce 
human beings of a different type from that which 
is familiar to them in their own age, or even, 
perhaps, in their own country. The only security 
against this narrowness is a liberal mental cultiva- 
tion, and all it proves is that a person is not likely 
to be a good political economist who is nothing else. 

Thus far, we have had to do with M. Comte, as a 
sociologist, only in his critical capacity. We have 
now to deal with him as a constructor — the author 
of a sociological system. The first question is that 
of the Method proper to the study. His view of 
this is highly instructive. 

The Method proper to the Science of Society 
must be, in substance, the same as in all other 
sciences ; the interrogation and interpretation of 
experience, by the twofold process of Induction 
and Deduction. But its mode of practising these 
operations has features of peculiarity. In general, 
Induction furnishes to science the laws of the ele- 
mentary facts, from which, when known, those of 
the complex combinations are thought out deduc- 
tively : specific observation of complex phenomena 
yields no general laws, or only empirical ones ; its 
scientific function is to verify the laws obtained by 

6 * 



84 ATJGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

deduction. This mode of philosophizing is not 
adequate to the exigencies of sociological investi- 
gation. In social phenomena the elementary facts 
are feelings and actions, and the laws of these are 
the laws of human nature, social facts being the 
results of human acts and situations. Since, then, 
the phenomena of man in society result from his 
nature as an individual being, it might be thought 
that the proper mode of constructing a positive 
Social Science must be by deducing it from the 
general laws of human nature, using the facts of 
history merely for verification. Such, accordingly, 
has been the conception of social science by many 
of those who have endeavoured to render it posi- 
tive, particularly by the school of Bentham. M. 
Comte considers this as an error. We may, he 
says, draw from the universal laws of human 
nature some conclusions (though even these, we 
think, rather precarious) concerning the very earliest 
stages of human progress, of which there are either 
no, or very imperfect, historical records. But as 
society proceeds in its development, its pheno- 
mena are determined/more and more, not by the 
simple tendencies of universal human nature, but 
by the accumulated influence of past generations 
over the present. The human beings themselves, 
on the laws of whose nature the facts of history 
depend, are not abstract or universal but historical 
human beings, already shaped, and made what 
they are, by human society. This being the case, 
no powers of deduction could enable any one, 
starting from the mere conception of the Being 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 85 

Man, placed in a world such as the earth may 
have been before the commencement of human 
agency, to predict and calculate the phsenomena 
of his development such as they have in fact proved. 
If the facts of history, empirically considered, had 
not given rise to any generalizations, a deductive 
study of history could never have reached higher 
than more or less plausible conjecture. By good 
fortune (for the case might easily have been other- 
wise) the history of our species, looked at as a 
comprehensive whole, does exhibit a determinate 
course, a certain order of development : though 
history alone cannot prove this to be a necessary 
law, as distinguished from a temporary accident. 
Here, therefore, begins the office of Biology (or, as 
we should say, of Psychology) in the social science. 
The universal laws of human nature are part of 
the data of sociology, but in using them we must 
reverse the method of the deductive physical 
sciences : for while, in these, specific experience 
commonly serves to verify laws arrived at by de- 
duction, in sociology it is specific experience which 
suggests the laws, and deduction which verifies 
them. If a sociological theory, collected from 
historical evidence, contradicts the established 
general laws of human nature ; if (to use M. 
Comte's instances) it implies, in the mass of man- 
kind, any very decided natural bent, either in a 
good or in a bad direction ; if it supposes that the 
reason, in average human beings, predominates 
over the desires, or the disinterested desires over 
the personal ; we may know that history has been 



86 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

misinterpreted, and that the theory is false. On 
the other hand, if laws of social phenomena, em- 
pirically generalized from history, can when once 
suggested he affiliated to the known laws of human 
nature ; if the direction actually taken hy the de- 
velopments and changes of human society, can be 
seen to he such as the properties of man and of 
his dwelling-place made antecedently probable, 
the empirical generalizations are raised into posi- 
tive laws, and Sociology becomes a science. 

Much has been said and written for centuries 
past, by the practical or empirical school of politi- 
cians, in condemnation of theories founded on 
principles of human nature, without an historical 
basis ; and the theorists, in their turn, have suc- 
cessfully retaliated on the practicalists. But we 
know not any thinker who, before M. Comte, had 
penetrated to the philosophy of the matter, and 
placed the necessity of historical studies as the 
foundation of sociological speculation on the true 
footing. Prom this time any political thinker who 
fancies himself able to dispense with a connected 
view of the great facts of history, as a chain of 
causes and effects, must be regarded as below the 
level of the age ; while the vulgar mode of using 
history, by looking in it for parallel cases, as if any 
cases were parallel, or as if a single instance, or 
even many instances not compared and analysed, 
could reveal a law, will be more than ever, and 
irrevocably, discredited. 

The inversion of the ordinary relation between 
Deduction and Induction is not the only point in 



AUGUSTS COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 87 

which, according to M. Comte, the Method proper 
to Sociology differs from that of the sciences of 
inorganic nature. The common order of science 
proceeds from the details to the whole. The 
method of Sociology should proceed from the 
whole to the details. There is no universal prin- 
ciple for the order of study, but that of proceed- 
ing from the known to the unknown ; finding our 
way to the facts at whatever point is most open to 
our observation. In the phenomena of the social 
state, the collective phenomenon is more accessible 
to us than the parts of which it is composed. This 
is already, in a great degree, true of the mere 
animal body. It is essential to the idea of an 
organism, and it is even more true of the social 
organism than of the individual. The state of 
every part* of the social whole at any time, is in- 
timately connected with the contemporaneous state 
of all the others. Heligious belief, philosophy, 
science, the fine arts, the industrial arts, com- 
merce, navigation, government, all are in close 
mutual dependence on one another, insomuch that 
when any considerable change takes place in one, 
we may know that a parallel change in all the 
others has preceded or will follow it. The progress 
of society from one general state to another is not 
an aggregate of partial changes, but the product of 
a single impulse, acting through all the partial 
agencies, and can therefore be most easily traced 
by studying them together. Could it even be de- 
tected in them separately, its true nature could not 
be understood except by examining them in the 



88 ATJGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

ensemble. In constructing, therefore, a theory of 
society, all the different aspects of the social 
organization must be taken into consideration at 
once. 

Our space is not consistent with inquiring into 
all the limitations of this doctrine. It requires 
many of which M. Comte's theory takes no ac- 
count. There is one, in particular, dependent on 
a scientific artifice familiar to students of science, 
especially of the applications of mathematics to the 
study of nature. When an effect depends on several 
variable conditions, some of which change less, or 
more slowly, than others, we are often able to de- 
termine, either by reasoning or by experiment, 
what would be the law of variation of the effect if 
its changes depended only on some of the con- 
ditions, the remainder being supposed' constant. 
The law so found will be sufficiently near the truth 
for all times and places in which the latter set of 
conditions do not vary greatly, and will be a basis 
to set out from when it becomes necessary to allow 
for the variations of those conditions also. Most of 
the conclusions of social science applicable to 
practical use are of this description. M. Comte's 
system makes no room for them. We have seen 
how he deals with the part of them which are the 
most scientific in character, the generalizations of 
political economy. 

There is one more point in the general philo- 
sophy of sociology requiring notice. Social pheno- 
mena, like all others, present two aspects, the 
statical, and the dynamical ; the phenomena of 



AUGUSTS COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 89 

equilibrium, and those of motion. The statical 
aspect is that of the laws of social existence, con- 
sidered abstractedly from progress, and confined to 
what is common to the progressive and the station- 
ary state. The dynamical aspect is that of social 
progress. The statics of society is the study of the 
conditions of existence and permanence of the 
social state. The dynamics studies the laws of its 
evolution. The first is the theory of the consensus, 
or interdependence of social phenomena. The 
second is the theory of their filiation. 

The first division M. Comte, in his great work, 
treats in a much more summary manner than the 
second ; and it forms* to our thinking, the . weak- 
est part of the treatise. lie can hardly have seemed 
even to himself to have originated, in the statics of 
society, anything new, 41 unless his revival of the 
Catholic idea of a Spiritual Power may be so con- 
sidered. The remainder, with the exception of de- 
tached thoughts, in which even his feeblest pro- 
ductions are always rich, is trite, while in our 
judgment far from being always true. 

He begins by a statement of the general pro- 
perties of human nature which make social exist- 

* Indeed his claim to be the creator of Sociology does not extend to 
this branch of the science ; on the contrary, he, in a subsequent work, 
expressly declares that the real founder of it was Aristotle, by whom 
the theory of the conditions of social existence was carried as far 
towards perfection as was possible in the absence of any theory of 
Progress. Without going quite this length, we think it hardly possible 
to appreciate too highly the merit of those early efforts, beyond which 
little progress had been made, until a very recent period, either in 
ethical or in political science. 



90 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM, 

ence possible. Man has a spontaneous propensity 
to the society of his fellow-beings, and seeks it in- 
stinctively, for its own sake, and not out of regard 
to the advantages it procures for him, which, in 
many conditions of humanity, must appear to him 
very problematical. Man has also a certain, though 
moderate, amount of natural benevolence. On the 
other hand, these social propensities are by nature 
weaker than his selfish ones ; and the social state, 
being mainly kept in existence through the former, 
involves an habitual antagonism between the two. 
Eurther, our wants of all kinds, from the purely 
organic upwards, can only be satisfied by means of 
labour, nor does bodily labour suffice, without the 
guidance of intelligence. But labour, especially 
when prolonged and monotonous, is naturally 
hateful, and mental labour the most irksome of 
all ; and hence a second antagonism, which must 
exist in all societies whatever. The character of 
the society is principally determined by the degree 
in which the better incentive, in each of these 
cases, makes head against the worse. In both the 
points, human nature is capable of great ameliora- 
tion. The social instincts may approximate much 
nearer to the strength of the personal ones, though 
never entirely coming up to it ; the aversion to 
labour in general, and to intellectual labour in par- 
ticular, may be much weakened, and the predom- 
inance of the inclinations over the reason greatly 
diminished, though never completely destroyed. 
The spirit of improvement results from the increas- 
ing strength of the social instincts, combined with 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 91 

the growth of an intellectual activity, which guid- 
ing the personal propensities, inspires each indi- 
vidual with a deliberate desire to improve his con- 
dition. The personal instincts left to their own 
guidance, and the indolence and apathy natural to 
mankind, are the sources which mainly feed the 
spirit of Conservation. The struggle between the 
two spirits is an universal incident of the social 
state. 

The next of the universal elements in human 
society is family life ; which M. Comte regards as 
originally the sole, and always the principal, source 
of the social feelings, and the only school open to 
mankind in general, in which unselfishness can be 
learnt, and the feelings and conduct demanded 
by social relations be made habitual. M. Comte 
takes this opportunity of declaring his opinions on 
the proper constitution of the family, and in parti- 
cular of the marriage institution. They are of the 
most orthodox and conservative sort. M. Comte 
adheres not only to the popular Christian, but to 
the Catholic view of marriage in its utmost strict- 
ness, and rebukes Protestant nations for having 
tampered with the indissolubility of the engage- 
ment, by permitting divorce. He admits that the 
marriage institution has been, in various respects, 
beneficially modified with the advance of society, 
and that we may not yet have reached the last of 
these modifications ; but strenuously maintains 
that such changes cannot possibly affect what he 
regards as the essential principles of the institu- 
tion — the irrevocability of the engagement, and the 



92 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

complete subordination of the wife to the husband, 
and of women generally to men ; which are pre- 
cisely the great vulnerable points of the existing 
constitution of society on this important subject. 
It is unpleasant to have to say it of a philosopher, 
but the incidents of his life which have been made 
public by his biographers afford an explanation of 
one of these two opinions : he had quarrelled with 
his wife.* At a later period, under the influence of 
circumstances equally personal, his opinions and 
feelings respecting women were very much modi- 
fied, without becoming more rational : in his final 
scheme of society, instead of being treated as grown 
children, they were exalted into goddesses : hon- 
ours, privileges, and immunities, were lavished on 
them, only not simple justice. On the other 
question, the irrevocability of marriage, M. Comte 
must receive credit for impartiality, since the oppo- 
site doctrine would have better suited his personal 
convenience : but we can give him no other credit, 
for his argument is not only futile but refutes 
itself. He says that with liberty of divorce, life 
would be spent in a constant succession of experi- 
ments and failures ; and in the same breath con- . 
gratulates himself on the fact, that modern manners 
and sentiments have in the main prevented the 
baneful effects which the toleration of divorce in 
Protestant countries might have been expected to 

fr It is due to them both to say, that he continued to express, in 
letters which have been published, a high opinion of her, both morally 
and intellectually ; and her persistent and strong concern for his inter- 
ests and his fame is attested both by M. Littre and by his own corre- 
spondence. 



ATJGUSTE COMTB AND POSITIVISM. 93 

produce. He did not perceive that if modern habits 
and feelings have successfully resisted what he deems 
the tendency of a less rigorous marriage law, it must 
be because modern habits and feelings are inconsist- 
ent with the perpetual series of new trials which 
he dreaded. If there are tendencies in human 
nature which seek change and variety, there are 
others which demand fixity, in matters which touch 
the daily sources of happiness ; and one who had 
studied history as much as M. Comte, ought to 
have known that ever since the nomad mode of 
life was exchanged for the agricultural, the latter 
tendencies have been always gaining ground on the 
former. All experience testifies that regularity in 
domestic relations is almost in direct proportion to 
industrial civilization. Idle life, and military life 
with its long intervals of idleness, are the condi- 
tions to which either sexual profligacy, or prolong- 
ed vagaries of imagination on that subject, are 
congenial. Busy men have no time for them, and 
have too much other occupation for their thoughts : 
they require that home should be a place of rest, 
not of incessantly renewed excitement and disturb- 
ance. In the condition, therefore, into which 
modern society has passed, there is no probability 
that marriages would often be contracted without a 
sincere desire on both sides that they should be 
permanent. That this has been the case hitherto 
in countries where divorce was permitted, we have 
on M. Comte's own showing : and everything leads 
us to believe that the power, if granted elsewhere, 
would in general be used only for its legitimate 



91 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

purpose — for enabling those who, by a blameless or 
excusable mistake, have lost their first throw for 
domestic happiness, to free themselves (with due 
regard for all interests concerned) from the bur- 
thensome yoke, and try, under more favourable 
auspices, another chance. Any further discussion 
of these great social questions would evidently be 
incompatible with the nature and limits of the 
present paper. 

Lastly, a phenomenon universal in all societies, 
and constantly assuming a wider extension as they 
advance in their progress, is the co-operation of 
mankind one with another, by the division of 
employments and interchange of commodities and 
services ; a communion which extends to nations 
as well as individuals. The economic importance 
of this spontaneous organization of mankind as 
joint workers with and for one another, has often 
been illustrated. Its moral effects, in connecting 
them by their interests, and as a more remote con- 
sequence, by their sympathies, are equally salutary. 
But there are some things to be said on the other 
side. The increasing specialisation of all employ- 
ments ; the division of mankind into innumerable 
small fractions, each engrossed by an extremely 
minute fragment of the business of society, is not 
without inconveniences, as well moral as intellect- 
ual, which, if they could not be remedied, would 
be a serious abatement from the benefits of ad- 
vanced civilization. The interests of the whole — the 
bearings of things on the ends of the social union 
— are less and less present to the minds of men 



ATTGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 95 

who have so contracted a sphere of activity. The 
insignificant detail which forms their whole occu- 
pation — the infinitely minute wheel they help to 
turn in the machinery of society — does not arouse 
or gratify any feeling of public spirit, or unity with 
their fellow-men. Their work is a mere tribute to 
physical necessity, not the glad performance of a 
social office. This lowering effect of the extreme 
division of labour tells most of all on those who are 
set up as the lights and teachers of the rest. A 
man's mind is as fatally narrowed, and his feelings 
towards the great ends of humanity as miserably 
stunted, by giving all his thoughts to the classifi- 
cation of a few insects or the resolution of a few 
equations, as to sharpening the points or putting on 
the heads of pins. The " dispersive speciality " of 
the present race of scientific men, who, unlike their 
predecessors, have a positive aversion to enlarged 
views, and seldom either know or care for any of 
the interests of mankind beyond the narrow limits 
of their pursuit, is dwelt on by M. Comte as one of 
the great and growing evils of the time, and the 
one which most retards moral and intellectual 
regeneration. To contend against it is one of the 
main purposes towards which he thinks the forces 
of society should be directed. The obvious remedy 
is a large and liberal general education, prepara- 
tory to all special pursuits: and this is M. Comte's 
opinion : but the education of youth is not in his 
estimation enough : he requires an agency set 
apart for obtruding upon all classes of persons 
through the whole of life, the paramount claims of 



98 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

the general interest, and the comprehensive ideas 
that demonstrate the mode in which human actions 
promote or impair it. In other words, he demands 
a moral and intellectual authority, charged with 
the duty of guiding men's opinions and enlighten- 
ing and warning their consciences ; a Spiritual 
Power, whose judgments on all matters of high 
moment should deserve, and receive, the same uni- 
versal respect and deference which is paid to the 
united judgment of astronomers in matters astro- 
nomical. The very idea of such an authority 
implies that an unanimity has been attained, at 
least in essentials, among moral and political 
thinkers, corresponding or approaching to that 
which already exists in the other sciences. There 
cannot be this unanimity, until the true methods 
of positive science have been applied to all subjects, 
as completely as they have been applied to the 
study of physical science : to this, however, there 
is no real obstacle ; and when once it is accom- 
plished, the same degree of accordance will natur- 
ally follow. The undisputed authority which astro- 
nomers possess in astronomy, will be possessed 
on the great social questions by Positive Philoso- 
phers ; to whom will belong the spiritual govern- 
ment of society, subject to two conditions : that 
they be entirely independent, within their own 
sphere, of the temporal government, and that they 
be peremptorily excluded from all share in it, re- 
ceiving instead the entire conduct of education. 

This is the leading feature in M. Comte's con- 
ception of a regenerated society ; and however much 



AUGTTSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 97 

this ideal differs from that which is implied more 
or less confusedly in the negative philosophy of the 
last three centuries, we hold the amount of truth in 
the two to be about the same. M. Comte has got 
hold of half the truth, and the so-called liberal or 
revolutionary school possesses the other half ; each 
sees what the other does not see, and seeing it ex- 
clusively, draws consequences from it which to the 
other appear mischievously absurd. It is, without 
doubt, the necessary condition of mankind to re- 
ceive most of their opinions on the authority of 
those who have specially studied the matters to 
which they relate. The wisest can act on no other 
rule, on subjects with which they are not them- 
selves thoroughly conversant ; and the mass of 
mankind have always done the like on all the great 
subjects of thought and conduct, acting with im- 
plicit confidence on opinions of which they did not 
know, and were often incapable of understanding, 
the grounds, but on which as long as their natural 
guides were unanimous they fully relied, growing 
uncertain and sceptical only when these became 
divided, and teachers who as far as they could 
judge were equally competent, professed contra- 
dictory opinions. Any doctrines which come re- 
commended by the nearly universal verdict of 
instructed minds will no doubt continue to be, as 
they have hitherto been, accepted without mis- 
giving by the rest. The difference is, that with the 
wide diffusion of scientific education among the 
whole people, demanded by M. Comte, their faith, 
however implicit, would not be that of ignorance : 

7 



98 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

it would not be the blind submission of dunces to 
men of knowledge, but the intelligent deference of 
those who know much, to those who know still 
more. It is those who have some knowledge of 
astronomy, not those who have none at all, who 
best appreciate how prodigiously more Lagrange or 
Laplace knew than themselves. This is what can 
be said in favour of M. Comte. On the contrary 
side it is to be said, that in order that this salutary 
ascendancy over opinion should be exercised by the 
most eminent thinkers, it is not necessary that they 
should be associated and organized. The ascend- 
ancy will come of itself when the unanimity is attain- 
ed, without which it is neither desirable nor possi- 
ble. It is because astronomers agree in their 
teaching that astronomy is trusted, aad not because 
there is an Academy of Sciences or a Royal Society 
issuing decrees or passing resolutions. A consti- 
tuted moral authority can only be required when 
the object is not "merely to promulgate and diffuse 
principles of conduct, but to direct the detail of 
their application ; to declare and inculcate, not 
duties, but each person's duty, as was attempted by 
the spiritual authority of the middle ages. Prom 
this extreme application of his principle M. Comte 
does not shrink. A function of this sort, no doubt, 
may often be very usefully discharged by individual 
members of the speculative class ; but if entrusted 
to any organized body, would involve nothing less 
than a spiritual despotism. This however is what 
M. Comte really contemplated, though it would 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 90 

practically nullify that peremptory separation of 
the spiritual from the temporal power, which he 
justly deemed essential to a wholesome state of 
society. Those whom an irresistible public opinion 
invested with the right to dictate or control the 
acts of rulers, though without the means of backing 
their advice by force, would have all the real power 
of the temporal authorities, without their labours or 
their responsibilities. M. Comte would probably 
have answered that the temporal rulers, having the 
whole legal power in their hands, would certainly 
not pay to the spiritual authority more than a very 
limited obedience : which amounts to saying that 
the ideal form of society which he sets up, is 
only fit to be an ideal because it cannot possibly be 
realized. 

That education should be practically directed 
by the philosophic class, when there is a philosophic 
class who have made good their claim to the place 
in opinion hitherto filled by the clergy, would be 
natural and indispensable. But that all education 
should be in the hands of a centralized authority, 
whether composed of clergy or of philosophers, and 
be consequently all framed on the same model, and 
directed to the perpetuation of the same type, is a 
state of things which instead of becoming more ac- 
ceptable, will assuredly be more repugnant to man- 
kind, with every step of their progress in the unfet- 
tered exercise of their highest faculties. We shall 
see, in the Second Part, the evils with which the 
conception of the new Spiritual Power is pregnant, 

7 * 
LOFC. 



100 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

coining out into full bloom in the more complete 
development which M. Comte gave to the idea in 
his later years. 

After this unsatisfactory attempt to trace the 
outline of Social Statics, M. Comte passes to a 
topic on which he is much more at home — the 
subject of his most eminent speculations ; Social 
Dynamics, or the laws of the evolution of human 
society. 

Two questions meet us at the outset : Is there 
•7" a natural evolution in human affairs ? and is that 
evolution an improvement ? M. Comte resolves 
them both in the affirmative by the same answer. 
The natural progress of society consists in the 
growth of our human attributes, comparatively to 
our animal and our purely organic ones : the pro- 
gress of our humanity towards an ascendancy over our 
animality, ever more nearly approached though in- 
capable of being completely realized. This is the 
character and tendency of human development, or 
of what is called civilization ; and the obligation of 
seconding this movement — of working in the direc- 
tion of it — is the nearest approach which M. Comte 
makes in this treatise to a general principle or 
standard of morality. 

But as our more eminent, and peculiarly human, 
faculties are of various orders, moral, intellectual, 
and aesthetic, the question presents itself, is there 
any one of these whose development is the predomi- 
nant agency in the evolution of our species ? Ac- 
cording to M. Comte, the main agent in the pro- 
gress of mankind is their intellectual development. 



ATJGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 101 

Not because the intellectual is the most powerful 
part of our nature, for, limited to its inherent 
strength, it is one of the weakest : but because it is 
the guiding part, and acts not with its own strength 
alone, but with the united force of all parts of our 
nature which it can draw after it. In a social state 
the feelings and propensities cannot act with their 
full power, in a determinate direction, unless the 
speculative intellect places itself at their head. The 
passions are, in the individual man, a more ener- 
getic power than a mere intellectual conviction ; 
but the passions tend to divide, not to unite, man- 
kind : it is only by a common belief that passions 
are brought to work together, and become a collect- 
ive force instead of forces neutralizing one another. 
j Our intelligence is first awakened by the stimulus 
of our animal wants and of our stronger and 
coarser desires ; and these for a long time almost 
exclusively determine the direction in which our 
intelligence shall work : but once roused to acti- 
vity, it assumes more and more the management of 
the operations of which stronger impulses are the 
prompters, and constrains them to follow its lead, 
not by its own strength, but because in the play of 
antagonistic forces, the path it points out is (in 
scientific phraseology) the direction of least resist- 
ance. Personal interests and feelings, in the social 
state, can only obtain the maximum of satisfaction 
by means of co-operation, and the necessary con- 
dition of co-operation is a common belief. All 
human society, consequently, is grounded on a 
system of fundamental opinions, which only the 



102 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

speculative faculty can provide, and which when 
provided, directs our other impulses in their mode 
of seeking their gratification. And hence the his- 
tory of opinions, and of the speculative faculty, has 
always "been the leading element in the history of 
mankind. 

This doctrine has heen combated by Mr Her- 
bert Spencer, in the pamphlet already referred to ; 
and we will quote, in his own words, the theory 
he propounds in opposition to it : — 

"Ideas do not govern and overthrow the world ; the world is go- 
verned or overthrown by feelings, to which ideas serve only as guides. 
The social mechanism does not rest finally upon opinions, but almost 
wholly upon character. Not intellectual anarchy, but moral antago- 
nism, is the cause of political crises. All social phenomena are pro- 
duced by the totality of human emotions and beliefs, of which the 
emotions are mainly predetermined, while the beliefs are mainly post- 
determined. Men's desires are chiefly inherited ; but their beliefs are 
chiefly acquired, and depend on surrounding conditions ; and the most 
important surrounding conditions depend on the social state which the 
prevalent desires have produced. The social state at any time exist- 
ing, is the resultant of all the ambitions, self-interests, fears, rever- 
ences, indignations, sympathies, &c, of ancestral citizens and existing 
citizens. The ideas current in this social state must, on the average, 
be congruous with the feelings of citizens, and therefore, on the average, 
with the. social state these feelings have produced. Ideas wholly foreign 
to this social state cannot be evolved, and if introduced from without, 
cannot get accepted — or, if accepted, die out when the temporary 
phase of feeling which caused their acceptance ends. Hence, though 
advanced ideas, when once established, act upon society and aid its 
further advance, yet the establishment of such ideas depends on the 
fitness of society for receiving them. Practically, the popular charac- 
ter and the social state determine what ideas shall be current ; instead 
of the current ideas determining the social state and the character. 
The modification of men's moral natures, caused by the continuous 



AUGTTSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 103 

discipline of social life, which adapts them more and more to social 
relations, is therefore the chief proximate cause of social progress."* 

A great part of these statements would have 
been acknowledged as true by M. Comte, and be- 
long as much to his theory as to Mr Spencer's. The 
re-action of all other mental and social elements 
upon the intellectual not only is fully recognized by 
him, but his philosophy of history makes great use 
of it, pointing out that the principal intellectual 
changes could not have taken place unless changes 
in other elements of society had preceded ; but also 
showing that these were themselves consequences 
of prior intellectual changes. It will not be found, 
on a fair examination of what M. Comte has written, 
that he has overlooked any of the truth that there 
is in Mr Spencer's theory. He would not indeed 
have said (what Mr Spencer apparently wishes us 
to say) that the effects which can be historically 
traced, for example to religion, were not produced 
by the belief in God, but by reverence and fear of 
him. He would have said that the reverence and 
fear presuppose the belief : that a God must be be- 
lieved in before he can be feared or reverenced. The 
whole influence of the belief in a God upon society 
and civilization, depends on the powerful human 
sentiments which are ready to attach themselves to 
the belief ; and yet the sentiments are only a social 
force at all, through the definite direction given to 
them by that or some other intellectual conviction ; 
nor did the sentiments spontaneously throw up the 
belief in a God, since in themselves they were equally 

* " Of the Classification of the Sciences," pp. 37, 38. 



104 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

capable of gathering round some other object. 
Though it is true that men's passions and interests 
often dictate their opinions, or rather decide their 
choice among the two or three forms of opinion 
which the existing condition of human intelligence 
renders possible, this disturbing cause is confined to 
morals, politics, and religion ; and it is the intellect- 
ual movement in other regions than these, which is 
at the root of all the great changes in human affairs. 
It was not human emotions and passions which 
discovered the motion of the earth, or detected the 
evidence of its antiquity ; which exploded Scholas- 
ticism, and inaugurated the exploration of nature ; 
which invented printing, paper, and the mariner's 
compass. Yet the Reformation, the English and 
French Revolutions, and still greater moral and 
social changes yet to come, are direct consequences 
of these and similar discoveries. Even alchemy and 
astrology were not believed because people thirsted 
for gold and were anxious to pry into the future, 
for these desires are as strong now as they were 
then : but because alchemy and astrology were con- 
ceptions natural to a particular stage in the growth 
of human knowledge, and consequently determined 
during that stage the particular means whereby the 
passions which always exist, sought their gratifica- 
tion. To say that men's intellectual beliefs do not 
determine their conduct, is like saying that the ship 
is moved by the steam and not by the steersman. The 
steam indeed is the motive power ; the steersman, 
left to himself, could not advance the vessel a single 
inch ; yet it is the steersman's will and the steers- 



ATJGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 105 

man's knowledge which decide in what direction it 
shall move and whither it shall go. 

Examining next what is the natural order of in- 
tellectual progress among mankind, M. Comte ob- 
serves, that as their general mode of conceiving the 
universe must give its character to all their con- 
ceptions of detail, the determining fact in their in- 
tellectual history must be the natural succession of 
theories of the universe ; which, it has been seen, 
consists of three stages, the theological, the me- 
taphysical, and the positive. The passage of man- 
kind through these stages, including the successive 
modifications of the theological conception by 
the rising influence of the other two, is, to M. 
Comte's mind, the most decisive fact in the evolu- 
tion of humanity. Simultaneously, however, there 
has been going on throughout history a parallel 
movement in the purely temporal department of 
things, consisting of the gradual decline of the 
military mode of life (originally the chief occupa- 
tion of all freemen) and its replacement by the in- 
dustrial. M. Comte maintains that there is a 
necessary connexion and interdependence between 
this historical sequence and the other : and he easily 
shows that the progress of industry and that of 
positive science are correlative ; man's power to 
modify the facts of nature evidently depending on 
the knowledge he has acquired of their laws. We do 
not think him equally successful in showing a 
natural connexion between the theological mode of 
thought and the military system of society : but 
since they both belong to the same age of the world 



106 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

— since each is, in itself, natural and inevitable, and 
they are together modified and together undermined 
by the same cause, the progress of science and in- 
dustry, M. Comte is justified in considering them 
as linked together, and the movement by which 
mankind emerge from them as a single evolution. 

These propositions having been laid down as the 
first principles of social dynamics, M. Comte pro- 
ceeds to verify and apply them by a connected view 
of universal history. This survey nearly fills two 
large volumes, above a third of the work, in all of 
which there is scarcely a sentence that does not add 
an idea. We regard it as by far his greatest achieve- 
ment, except his review of the sciences, and in some 
respects more striking even than that. We wish it 
were practicable in the compass of an essay like the 
present, to give even a faint conception of the ex- 
traordinary merits of this historical analysis. It 
must be read to be appreciated. Whoever disbe- 
lieves that the philosophy of history can be made a 
science, should suspend his judgment until he has 
read these volumes of M. Comte. We do not affirm 
that they would certainly change his opinion ; but 
we would strongly advise him to give them a 
chance. 

We shall not attempt the vain task of abridgment. 
A few words are all we can give to the subject. 
M. Comte confines himself to the main stream of 
human progress, looking only at the races and 
nations that led the van, and regarding as the 
successors of a people not their actual descendants, 
but those who took up the thread of progress after 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 107 

them. His object is to characterize truly, though 
generally, the successive states of society through 
which the advanced guard of our species has 
passed, and the filiation of these states on one 
another — how each grew out of the preceding and 
was the parent of the following state. A more 
detailed explanation, taking into account minute 
differences and more special and local phenomena, 
M. Comte does not aim at, though he does not 
avoid it when it falls in his path. Here, as in all 
his other speculations, we meet occasional mis- 
judgments, and his historical correctness in minor 
matters is now and then at fault ; but we may 
well wonder that it is not oftener so, considering 
the vastness of the field, and a passage in one 
of his prefaces in which he says of himself that 
he rapidly amassed the materials for his great 
enterprise (vi. 34). This expression in his mouth 
does not imply what it would in that of the 
majority of men, regard being had to his rare 
capacity of prolonged and concentrated mental 
labour : and it is wonderful that he so seldom 
gives cause to wish that his collection of materials 
had been less " rapid." But (as he himself re- 
marks) in an inquiry of this sort the vulgarest 
facts are the most important. A movement common 
to all mankind — to all of them at least who do 
move — must depend on causes affecting them all ; 
and these, from the scale on which they operate, 
cannot require abstruse research to bring them to 
light : they are not only seen, but best seen, in the 
most obvious, most universal, and most undisputed 



108 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

phenomena. Accordingly M. Comte lays no claim 
to new views respecting the mere facts of history ; 
he takes them as he finds them, bnilds almost 
exclusively on those concerning which there is no 
dispute, and only tries what positive results can 
be obtained by combining them. Among the vast 
mass of historical observations which he has 
grouped and co-ordinated, if we have found any 
errors they are in things which do not affect his 
main conclusions. The chain of causation by 
which he connects the spiritual and temporal life 
of each era with one another and with the entire 
series, will be found, we think, in all essentials, 
irrefragable. When local or temporary disturbing 
causes have to be taken into the account as modify- 
ing the general movement, criticism has more to 
say. But this will only become important when 
the attempt is made to write the history or delineate 
the character of some given society on M. Comte's 
principles. 

Such doubtful statements, or misappreciations 
of states of society, as we have remarked, are con- 
fined to cases which stand more or less apart from 
the principal line of development of the progressive 
societies. For instance, he makes greatly too much 
of what, with many other Continental thinkers, he 
calls the Theocratic state. He regards this as a 
natural, and at one time almost an universal, stage 
of social progress, though admitting that it either 
never existed or speedily ceased in the two ancient 
nations to which mankind are chiefly indebted for 
being permanently progressive. We hold it doubt- 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 100 

ful if there ever existed what M. Comte means by 
a theocracy. There was indeed no lack of societies 
in which, the civil and penal law being supposed to 
have been divinely revealed, the priests were its 
authorized interpreters. But this is the case even 
in Mussulman countries, the extreme opposite of 
theocracy. By a theocracy we understand to be 
meant, and we understand M. Comte to mean, 
a society founded on caste, and in which the 
speculative, necessarily identical with the priestly 
caste, has the temporal government in its hands or 
under its control. We believe that no such state 
of things ever existed in the societies commonly 
cited as theocratic. There is no reason to think 
that in any of them, the king, or chief of the 
government, was ever, unless by occasional usurp- 
ation, a member of the priestly caste.* It was 

* In the case of Egypt we admit that there may be cited against 
us the authority of Plato, in whose Politicus it is said that the king of 
Egypt must be a member of the priestly caste, or if by usurpation a 
member of any other caste acquired the sovereignty he must be initi- 
ated with the sacerdotal order. But Plato was writing of a state of 
things which already belonged to the past ; nor have we any assurance 
that his information on Egyptian institutions was authentic and ac- 
curate. Had the king been necessarily or commonly a member of the 
priestly order, it is most improbable that the careful Herodotus, of 
whose comprehensive work an entire book was devoted to a minute 
account of Egypt and its institutions, and who collected his information 
from Egyptian priests in the country itself, would have been ignorant 
of a part so important, and tending so much to exalt the dignity of the 
priesthood, who were much more likely to affirm it falsely to Plato 
than to withhold the knowledge of it if true from Heredotus. Not 
only is Herodotus silent respecting any such law or custom, but he 
thinks it needful to mention that in one particular instance the king 
(by name Sethos) was a priest, which he would scarcely have done 



110 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

not so in Israel, even in the time of the Judges ; 
Jephtha, for example, was a Gileadite, of the tribe 
of Manasseh, and a military captain, as all govern- 
ors in such an age and country needed to be. 
Priestly rulers only present themselves in two 
anomalous cases, of which next to nothing is 
known : the Mikados of Japan and the Grand 
Lamas of Thibet : in neither of which instances 
was the general constitution of society one of caste, 
and in the. latter of them the priestly sovereignty is 
as nominal as it has become in the former. India 
is the typical specimen of the institution of caste — 
the only case in which we are certain that it ever 
really existed, for its existence anywhere else is a 
matter of more or less probable inference in the 
remote past. But in India, where the importance 
of the sacerdotal order was greater than in any 
other recorded state of society, the king not only 
was not a priest, but, consistently with the 
religious law, could not be one : he belonged to a 
different caste. The Brahmins were invested with 
an exalted character of sanctity, and an enormous 
amount of civil privileges ; the king was enjoined 
to have a council of Brahmin advisers ; but practi- 
cally he took their advice or disregarded it exactly 
as he pleased. As is observed by the historian who 

if this had been other than an exceptional case. It is likely enough 
that a king of Egypt would learn the hieratic character, and would not 
suffer any of the mysteries of law or religion which were in the keeping 
of the priests to be withheld from him ; and this was very probably all 
the foundation which existed for the assertion of the Eleatic stranger in 
Plato's dialogue. 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. Ill 

first threw the light of reason on Hindoo society,* 
the king, though in dignity, to judge by the 
written code, he seemed vastly inferior to the 
Brahmins, had always the full power of a despotic 
monarch : the reason being that he had the com- 
mand of the army, and the control of the public 
revenue. There is no case known to authentic 
history in which either of these belonged to the 
sacerdotal caste. Even in the cases most favour- 
able to them, the priesthood had no voice in tem- 
poral affairs, except the " consultative " voice 
which M. Comte's theory allows to every spiritual 
power. His collection of materials must have been 
unusually "rapid" in this instance, for he regards 
almost all the societies of antiquity, except the 
Greek and Roman, as theocratic, even Gaul under 
the Druids, and Persia under Darius ; admitting, 
however, that in these two countries, when they 
emerge into the light of history, the theocracy had 
already been much broken down by military usurp- 
ation. By what evidence he could have proved 
that it ever existed, we confess ourselves unable to 
divine. 

The only other imperfection worth noticing 
here, which we find in M. Comte's view of history, 
is that he has a very insufficient understanding of 
the peculiar phenomena of English development ; 
though he recognizes, and on the whole correctly 
estimates, its exceptional character in relation to 
the general European movement. His failure con- 
sists chiefly in want of appreciation of Protest- 

* Mill, History of British India, book ii. chap. iii. 



1 





112 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

antism ; which, like almost all thinkers, even un- 
believers, who have lived and thought exclusively 
in a Catholic atmosphere, he sees and knows only 
on its negative side, regarding the Reformation as 
a mere destructive movement, stopped short in too 
early a stage. He does not seem to be aware that 
Protestantism has any positive influences, other 
than the general ones of Christianity ; and misses 
one of the most important facts connected with it, 
its remarkable efficacy, as contrasted with Ca- 
tholicism, in cultivating the intelligence and con- 
science of the individual believer. Protestantism, 
when not merely professed but actually taken into 
the mind, makes a demand on the intelligence ; 
the mind is expected to be active, not passive, in 
the reception of it. The feeling of a direct re- 
sponsibility of the individual immediately to God, 
is almost wholly a creation of Protestantism. Even 
when Protestants were nearly as persecuting as 
Catholics (quite as much so they never were) ; 
even when they held as firmly as Catholics that 
salvation depended on having the true belief, they 
still maintained that the belief was not to be 
accepted from a priest, but to be sought and found 
by the believer, at his eternal peril if he failed ; 
and that no one could answer to Gocl for him, but 
that he had to answer for himself. The avoidance 
of fatal error thus became in a great measure a 
question of culture ; and there was the strongest 
inducement to every believer, however humble, to 
seek culture and to profit by it. In those Pro- 
testant countries, accordingly, whose Churches 



ATTGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 113 

were not, as the Church of England always was, 
principally political institutions — in Scotland, for 
instance, and the New England States — an amount 
of education was carried down to the poorest of the 
people, of which there is no other example ; every 
peasant expounded the Bible to his family (many 
to their neighbours), and had a mind practised in 
meditation and discussion on all the points of his 
religious creed. The food may not have been 
the most nourishing, but we cannot be blind 
to the sharpening and strengthening exercise 
which such great topics gave to the understanding 
— the discipline in abstraction and reasoning 
which such mental occupation brought down to 
the humblest layman, and one of the consequences 
of which was the privilege long enjoyed by Scot- 
land of supplying the greater part of Europe with 
professors for its universities, and educated and 
skilled workmen for its practical arts. 

This, however, notwithstanding its importance, 
is, in a comprehensive view of universal history, 
only a matter of detail. "We find no fundamental 
errors in M. Comte's general conception of history. 
He is singularly exempt from most of the twists and 
exaggerations which we are used to find in almost 
all thinkers who meddle with speculations of 
this character. Scarcely any of them is so free 
(for example) from the opposite errors of ascribing 
too much or too little influence to accident, and to 
the qualities of individuals. The vulgar mistake 
of supposing that the course of history has no 
tendencies of its own, and that great events 



114 AUGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

usually proceed from small causes, or that kings, 
or conquerors, or the founders of philosophies and 
religions, can do with society what they please, 
no one has more completely avoided or more 
tellingly exposed. But he is equally free from the 
error of those who ascribe all to general causes, 
and imagine that neither casual circumstances, 
nor governments by their acts, nor individuals 
of genius by their thoughts, materially accelerate 
or retard human progress. This is the mistake 
which pervades the instructive writings of the 
thinker who in England and in our own times bore 
the nearest, though a very remote, resemblance to 
M. Comte — the lamented Mr Buckle ; who, had he 
not been unhappily cut off in an early stage of his 
labours, and before the complete maturity of his 
powers, would probably have thrown off an error, 
the more to be regretted as it gives a colour to the 
prejudice which regards the doctrine of the invari- 
ability of natural laws as identical with fatalism. 
Mr Buckle also fell into another mistake which M. 
Comte avoided, that of regarding the intellectual as 
the only progressive element in man, and the 
moral as too much the same at all times to affect 
even the annual average of crime. M. Comte 
shows, on the contrary, a most acute sense of the 
causes which elevate or lower the general level 
of moral excellence ; and deems intellectual pro- 
gress in no other way so beneficial as by creating a 
standard to guide the moral sentiments of man- 
kind, and a mode of bringing those sentiments 
effectively to. bear on conduct. 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 115 

M. Comte is equally free from the error of con- 
sidering any practical rule or doctrine that can be 
laid down in politics as universal and absolute. All 
political truth he deems strictly relative, implying 
as its correlative a given state or situation of 
society. This conviction is now common to him 
with all thinkers who are on a level with the age, 
and comes so naturally to any intelligent reader of 
history, that the only wonder is how men could 
have been prevented from reaching it sooner. It 
marks one of the principal differences between the 
political philosophy of the present time and that of 
the past ; but M. Comte adopted it when the oppo- 
site mode of thinking was still general, and there 
are few thinkers to whom the principle owes more 
in the way of comment and illustration. 

Again, while he sets forth the historical succes- 
sion of systems of belief and forms of political 
society, and places in the strongest light those im- 
perfections in each which make it impossible that 
any of them should be final, this does not make 
him for a moment unjust to the men or the 
opinions of the past. He accords with generous 
recognition the gratitude due to all who, with 
whatever imperfections of doctrine or even of con- 
duct, contributed materially to the work of human 
improvement. In all past modes of thought and 
forms of society he acknowledged a useful, in many 
a necessary, office, in carrying mankind through 
one stage of improvement into a higher. The theo- 
logical spirit in its successive forms, the metaphy- 
sical in its principal varieties, are honoured by him 

8 * 



116 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

for the services they rendered in bringing mankind 
out of pristine savagery into a state in which more 
advanced modes of belief became possible. His list 
of heroes and benefactors of mankind includes, not 
only every important name in the scientific move- 
ment, from Thales of Miletus to Fourier the mathe- 
matician and Blainville the biologist, and in the 
aesthetic from Homer to Manzoni, but the most 
illustrious names in the annals of the various reli- 
gions and philosophies, and the really great poli- 
ticians in all states of society.* Above all, he has 
the most profound admiration for the services ren- 
dered by Christianity, and by the Church of the 
middle ages. His estimate of the Catholic period 
is such as the majority of Englishmen (from whom 
we take the liberty to differ) would deem exagger- 
ated, if not absurd. The great men of Christianity, 
from St Paul to St Erancis of Assisi, receive his 
warmest homage : nor does he forget the greatness 
even of those who lived and thought in the centuries 
in which the Catholic Church, having stopt short 

L° At a somewhat later period M. Comte drew up what he termed 
a Positivist Calendar, in which every day was dedicated to some bene- 
factor of humanity (generally with the addition of a similar but minor 
luminary, to be celebrated in the room of his principal each bissex- 
tile year). In this no kind of human eminence, really useful, is 
omitted, except that which is merely negative and destructive. On 
this principle (which is avowed) the French pliilosophcs as such are ex- 
cluded, those only among them being admitted who, like Voltaire and 
Diderot, had claims to admission on other grounds : and the Protest- 
ant religious reformers are left out entirely, with the curious excep- 
tion of George Fox — who is included, we presume, in consideration of 
his Peace principles. 



AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 117 

while the world had gone on, had become a hin- 
drance to progress instead of a promoter of it ; 
such men as Fenelon and St Vincent de Paul, Bos- 
suet and Joseph de Maistre. A more comprehen- 
sive, and, in the primitive sense of the term, more 
catholic, sympathy and reverence towards real 
worth, and every kind of service to humanity, 
we have not met with in any thinker. Men who 
would have torn each other in pieces, who even 
tried to do so, if each usefully served in his own 
way the interests of mankind, are all hallowed to 
him. 

Neither is his a cramped and contracted notion 
4. of human excellence, which cares only for certain 
forms of development. He not only personally ap- 
preciates, but rates high in moral value, the crea- 
tions of poets and artists in all departments, deem- 
ing them, by their mixed appeal to the sentiments 
and the understanding, admirably fitted to educate 
the feelings of abstract thinkers, and enlarge the 
intellectual horizon of people of the world.* He 
regards the law of progress as applicable, in spite 
of appearances, to poetry and art as much as to 
science and politics. The common impression to 
the contrary he ascribes solely to the fact, that the 
perfection of aesthetic creation requires as its con- 
dition a consentaneousness in the feelings of man- 
kind, which depends for its existence on a fixed 

* He goes still further and deeper in a subsequent work. " L'art 
ramene doucement a la realite les contemplations trop abstraites du 
theoricien, tandis qu'il pousse noblement le praticien aux specula- 
tions desinteressees." Systeme de Politique Positive, i. 287, 



J 



118 ATJGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

and settled state of opinions : while the last five 
centuries have been a period not of settling, but 
of unsettling and decomposing, the most general 
beliefs and sentiments of mankind. The numerous 
monuments of poetic and artistic genius which 
the modern mind has produced even under this 
great disadvantage, are (he maintains) sufficient 
proof what great productions it will be capable of, 
when one harmonious vein of sentiment shall once 
more thrill through the whole of society, as in the 
days of Homer, of iEschylus, of Phidias, and even 
of Dante. 

After so profound and comprehensive a view of 
the progress of human society in the past, of which 
the future can only be a prolongation, it is natural 
to ask, to what use does he put this survey as a 
basis of practical recommendations ? Such recom- 
mendations he certainly makes, though, in the pre- 
sent Treatise, they are of a much less definite char- 
acter than in his later writings. But we miss a 
necessary link ; there is a break in the otherwise 
close concatenation of his speculations. We fail to 
see any scientific connexion between his theoretical 
explanation of the past progress of society, and his 
proposals for future improvement. The proposals 
are not, as we might expect, recommended as that 
towards which human society has been tending and 
working through the whole of history. It is thus 
that thinkers have usually proceeded, who formed 
theories for the future, grounded on historical 
analysis of the past. Tocqueville, for example, 
and others, finding, as they thought, through all 



AUGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 119 

history, a steady progress in the direction of social 
and political equality, argued that to smooth this 
transition, and make the best of what is certainly 
coming, is the proper employment of political fore- 
sight. We do not find M. Comte supporting his 
recommendations by a similar line of argument. 
They rest as completely, each on its separate rea- 
sons of supposed utility, as with philosophers who, 
like Bentham, theorize on politics without any his- 
torical basis at all. The only bridge of connexion 
which leads from his historical speculations to his 
practical conclusions, is the inference, that since 
the old powers of society, both in the region of 
thought and of action, are declining and destined 
to disappear, leaving only the two rising powers, 
positive thinkers on the one hand, leaders of indus- 
try on the other, the future necessarily belongs to 
these : spiritual power to the former, temporal to 
the latter. As a specimen of historical forecast 
this is very deficient ; for are there not the masses 
as well as the leaders of industry ? and is not theirs 
also a growing power ? Be this as it may, M. 
Comte' s conceptions of the mode in which these 
growing powers should be organized and used, are 
grounded on anything rather than on history. And 
we cannot but remark a singular anomaly in a 
thinker of M. Comte' s calibre. After the ample 
evidence he has brought forward of the slow growth 
of the sciences, all of which except the mathe- 
matico -astronomical couple are still, as he justly 
thinks, in a very early stage, it yet appears as if, 
to his mind, the mere institution of a positive 



120 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

science of sociology were tantamount to its com- 
pletion; as if all the diversities of opinion on the 
subject, which set mankind at variance, were solely 
owing to its having been studied in the theological 
or the metaphysical manner, and as if when the 
positive method which has raised up real sciences 
on other subjects of knowledge, is similarly em- 
ployed on this, divergence would at once cease, and 
the entire body of positive social inquirers would 
exhibit as much agreement in their doctrines as 
those who cultivate any of the sciences of inorganic 
life. Happy would be the prospects of mankind if 
this were so. A time such as M. Comte reckoned 
upon may come ; unless something stops the pro- 
gress of human improvement, it is sure to come : 
but after an unknown duration of hard thought 
and violent controversy. The period of decomposi- 
tion, which has lasted, on his own computation, 
from the beginning of the fourteenth century to 
the present, is not yet terminated : the shell of 
the old edifice will remain standing until there is 
another ready to replace it ; and the new synthesis 
is barely begun, nor is even the preparatory analy- 
sis completely finished. On other occasions M. 
Comte is very well aware that the Method of a 
science is not the science itself, and that when 
the difficulty of discovering the right processes 
has been overcome, there remains a still greater 
difficulty, that of applying them. This, which is 
true of all sciences, is truest of all in Sociology. 
The facts being more complicated, and depending 
on a greater concurrence of forces, than in any 



ATJGTJSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 121 

other science, the difficulty of treating them deduc- 
tively is proportionally increased, while the wide 
difference between any one case and every other in 
some of the circumstances which affect the result, 
makes the pretence of direct induction usually no 
better than empiricism. It is therefore, out of all 
proportion, more uncertain than in any other 
science, whether two inquirers equally competent 
and equally disinterested will take the same view 
of the evidence, or arrive at the same conclusion. 
When to this intrinsic difficulty is added the in- 
finitely greater extent to which personal or class 
interests and predilections interfere with impartial 
judgment, the hope of such accordance of opinion 
among sociological inquirers as would obtain, in 
mere deference to their authority, the universal 
assent which M. Comte's scheme of society re- 
quires, must be adjourned to an indefinite dis- 
tance. 

M. Comte's own theory is an apt illustration of 
these difficulties, since, though prepared for these 
speculations as no one had ever been prepared be- 
fore, his views of social regeneration even in the 
rudimentary form in which they appear above- 
ground in this treatise (not to speak of the singu- 
lar system into which he afterwards enlarged 
them) are such as perhaps no other person of 
equal knowledge and capacity would agree in. 
Were those views as true as they are questionable, 
they could not take effect until the unanimity 
among positive thinkers, to which he looked for- 
ward, shall have been attained; since the main- 



122 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

spring of his system is a Spiritual Power composed 
of positive philosophers, which only the previous 
attainment of the unanimity in question could call 
into existence. A few words will sufficiently ex- 
press the outline of his scheme. A corporation of 
philosophers, receiving a modest support from the 
state, surrounded by reverence, but peremptorily 
excluded not only from all political power or em- 
ployment, but from all riches, and all occupations 
except their own, are to have the entire direction 
of education : together with, not only the right 
and duty of advising and reproving all persons 
respecting both their public and their private life, 
but also a control (whether authoritative or only 
moral is not denned) over the speculative class 
itself, to prevent them from wasting time and in- 
genuity on inquiries and speculations of no value 
to mankind (among which he includes many now 
in high estimation), and compel them to employ all 
their powers on the investigations which may be 
judged, at the time, to be the most urgently im- 
portant to the general welfare. The temporal 
government which is to coexist with this spiritual 
authority, consists of an aristocracy of capitalists, 
whose dignity and authority are to be in the ratio 
of the degree of generality of their conceptions 
and operations — bankers at the summit, merchants 
next, then manufacturers, and agriculturists at the 
bottom of the scale. No representative system, or 
other popular organization, by way of counter- 
poise to this governing power, is ever contem- 
plated. The checks relied upon for preventing its 



AUGUSTS COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 123 

abuse, are the counsels and remonstrances of the 
Spiritual Power, and unlimited liberty of discus- 
sion and comment by all classes of inferiors. Of 
the mode in which either set of authorities should 
fulfil the office assigned to it, little is said in this 
treatise : but the general idea is, while regulating 
as little as possible by law, to make the pressure of 
opinion, directed by the Spiritual Power, so heavy 
on every individual, from the humblest to the 
most powerful, as to render legal obligation, in as 
many cases as possible, needless. Liberty and 
spontaneity on the part of individuals form no part 
of the scheme. M. Comte looks on them with as 
great jealousy as any scholastic pedagogue, or 
ecclesiastical director of consciences. Every par- 
ticular of conduct, public or private, is to be open 
to the public eye, and to be kept, by the power of 
opinion, in the course which the Spiritual corpora- 
tion shall judge to be the most right. 

This is not a sufficiently tempting picture to 
have much chance of making converts rapidly, and 
the objections to the scheme are too obvious to 
need stating. Indeed, it is only thoughtful per- 
sons to whom it will be credible, that speculations 
leading to this result can deserve the attention 
necessary for understanding them. We propose in 
the next Essay to examine them as part of the ela- 
borate and coherent system of doctrine, which M. 
Comte afterwards put together for the reconstruc- 
tion of society. Meanwhile the reader will gather, 
from what has been said, that M. Comte has not, 
in our opinion, created Sociology. Except his 



124 AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM. 

analysis of history, to which there is much to be 
added, but which we do not think likely to be 
ever, in its general features, superseded, he has 
done nothing in Sociology which does not require 
to be done over again, and better. Nevertheless, 
he has greatly advanced the study. Besides the 
great stores of thought, of various and often of 
eminent merit, with which he has enriched the 
subject, his conception of its method is so much 
truer and more profound than that of any one who 
preceded him, as to constitute an era in its culti- 
vation. If it cannot be said of him that he has 
created a science, it may be said truly that he has, 
for the first time, made the creation possible. 
This is a great achievement, and, with the extraor- 
dinary merit of his historical analysis, and of his 
philosophy of the physical sciences, is enough to 
immortalize his name. But his renown with pos- 
terity would probably have been greater than it is 
now likely to be, if after showing the way in 
which the social science should be formed, he had 
not flattered himself that he had formed it, and 
that it was already sufficiently solid for attempting 
to build upon its foundation the entire fabric of 
the Political Art. 



125 



PART II. 

THE LATEE, SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE.* 

The appended list of publications contain the 
materials for knowing and estimating what M. 
Comte termed his second career, in which the 
savant, historian, and philosopher of his funda- 
mental treatise, came forth transfigured as the 
High Priest of the Religion of Humanity. They 
include all his writings except the Cours de 
Philosophic Positive : for his early productions, 

tt 1. Systeme.de Politique Positive, ou Traite de Sociologies instituant 
la Religion de VHumanite. 4 vols. 8vo. Paris : 1851 — 1854. 

2. CatecMsme PositivTsfe, ou Sommaire Exposition de la Religion 
Universelle, en onze Entretiens Systematiques entre une Femme et un 
Pretre de VHumanite. 1 vol. 12mo. Paris : 1852. 

3. Appel aux Conservateurs. Paris : 1855 (brochure). 

4. Synthese Subjective, ou Systeme Universel des Conceptions pro- 
pres a VEtat Normal de VHumanite. Tome Premier, contenant le 
Systeme de Logique Positive, ou Traite de Philosophic Mathematique. 
8vo. Paris: 1856'. 

5. Auguste Comte et la PhilosopJiie Positive. Par E. Littre. 
1 vol. 8vo. Paris : 1863. 

6. Exposition AbregSe et Popitlaire de la PhilosopJiie et de la Reli- 
gion Positives. Par Celestin de Blignieres, ancien eleve de l'Ecole 
Polytechnique. 1 vol. 12mo. Paris : 1857. 

7. Notice sur VCEuvre et sur la Vie dAuguste Comte. Par le 
Docteur Eobinet, son Medecin, etl'un de ses treize Executeurs Testa- 
mentaires. 1 vol. 8vo. Paris : 1860. 



126 LATER SPECULATIONS OP M. COMTE. 

and the occasional publications of his later life, 
are reprinted as Preludes or Appendices to the 
treatises here enumerated, or in Dr Hobinet's 
volume, which, as well as that of M. Littre, also 
contains copious extracts from his correspondence. 
In the concluding pages of his great systematic 
work, M. Comte had announced four other treatises 
as in contemplation : on Politics ; on the Philoso- 
phy of Mathematics ; on Education, a project 
subsequently enlarged to include the systematiza- 
tion of Morals ; and on Industry, or the action of 
man upon external nature. Our list comprises 
the only two of these which he lived to execute. 
It further contains a brief exposition of his final 
doctrines, in the form of a Dialogue, or, as he 
terms it, a Catechism, of which a translation has 
been published by his principal English adherent, 
Mr Congreve. There has also appeared very 
recently, under the title of " A General View of 
Positivism," a translation by Dr Bridges, of the 
Preliminary Discourse in six chapters, prefixed to 
the Systeme de Politique Positive. The remaining 
three books on our list are the productions of dis- 
ciples in different degrees. M. Littr£, the only 
thinker of established reputation who accepts that 
character, is a disciple only of the Cours de 
Philosophie Positive, and can see the weak points 
even in that. Some of them he has discriminated 
and discussed with great judgment : and the merits 
of his volume, both as a sketch of M. Comte's 
life and an appreciation of his doctrines, would 
well deserve a fuller notice than we are able to give 



LATER SPECULATIONS OP M. COMTE. 127 

it here. M. de Blignieres is a far more thorough 
adherent ; so much so, that the reader of his 
singularly well and attractively written condens- 
ation and popularization of his master's doctrines, 
does not easily discover in what it falls short of 
that unqualified acceptance which alone, it would 
seem, could find favour with M. Comte. For he 
ended by casting off M. de Blignieres, as he had 
previously cast off M. Littre, and every other 
person who, having gone with him a certain 
length, refused to follow him to the end. The 
author of the last work in our enumeration, Dr 
Bobinet, is a disciple after M. Comte' s own heart ; 
one whom no difficulty stops, and no absurdity 
startles. But it is far from our disposition to 
speak otherwise than respectfully of Dr Bobinet 
and the other earnest men, who maintain round 
the tomb of their master an organized co-operation 
for the diffusion of doctrines which they believe 
destined to regenerate the human race. Their en- 
thusiastic veneration for him, and devotion to the 
ends he pursued, do honour alike to them and to 
their teacher, and are an evidence of the personal 
ascendancy he exercised over those who approached 
him ; an ascendancy which for a time carried away 
even M. Littre^ as he confesses, to a length which 
his calmer judgment does not now approve. 

These various writings raise many points of inter- 
est regarding M. Comte' s personal history, and 
some, not without philosophic bearings, respecting 
his mental habits: from all which matters we shall 
abstain, with the exception of two, which he him- 



128 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

self proclaimed with great emphasis, and a know- 
ledge of which is almost indispensable to an appre- 
hension of the characteristic difference between his 
second career and his first. It shonld be known 
that dnring his later life, and even before complet- 
ing his first great treatise, M. Gomte adopted a rule, 
to which he very rarely made any exception : to 
abstain systematically, not only from newspapers 
or periodical publications, even scientific, but from 
all reading whatever, except a few favourite poets 
in the ancient and modern European languages. 
This abstinence he practised for the sake of mental 
health; by way, as he said, of " hygiene cerebrate " 
We are far from thinking that the practice has 
nothing whatever to recommend it. For most 
thinkers, doubtless, it would be a very unwise one; 
but we will not affirm that it may not sometimes 
be advantageous to a mind of the peculiar quality 
of M. Comte's — one that can usefully devote itself 
to following out to the remotest developments a 
particular line of meditations, of so arduous a kind 
that the complete concentration of the intellect 
upon its own thoughts is almost a necessary condi- 
tion of success. When a mind of this character 
has laboriously and conscientiously laid in before- 
hand, as M. Comte had done, an ample stock of 
materials, he may be justified in thinking that he 
will contribute most to the mental wealth of man- 
kind by occupying himself solely in working upon 
these, without distracting his attention by continu- 
ally taking in more matter, or keeping a communi- 
cation open with other independent intellects. The 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 129 

practice, therefore, may be legitimate ; but no one 
should adopt it without being aware of what he 
loses by it. He must resign the pretension of 
arriving at the whole truth on the subject, what- 
ever it be, of his meditations. That he should 
effect this, even on a narrow subject, by the mere 
force of his own mind, building on the foundations 
of his predecessors, without aid or correction from 
his contemporaries, is simply impossible. He may 
do eminent service by elaborating certain sides of 
the truth, but he must expect to find that there are 
other sides which have wholly escaped his attention. 
However great his powers, everything that he can do 
without the aid of incessant remindings from other 
thinkers, is merely provisional, and will require a 
thorough revision. He ought to be aware of this, 
and accept it with his eyes open, regarding himself 
as a pioneer, not a constructor. If he thinks that 
he can contribute most towards the elements of the 
final synthesis by following out his own original 
thoughts as far as they will go, leaving to other 
thinkers, or to himself at a subsequent time, the 
business of adjusting them to the thoughts by 
which they ought to be accompanied, he is right 
in doing so. But he deludes himself if he imagines 
that any conclusions he can arrive at, while he 
practises M. Comte's rule of hygiene cerihrale, can 
possibly be definitive. 

Neither is such a practice, in a hygienic point 
of view, free from the gravest dangers to the philo- 
sopher's own mind. When once he has persuaded 
himself that he can work out the final truth on any 



130 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

subject, exclusively from his own sources, he is apt 
to lose all measure or standard by which to be ap- 
prized when he is departing from common sense. 
Living only with his own thoughts, he gradually 
forgets the aspect they present to minds of a differ- 
ent mould from his own; he looks at his conclusions 
only from the point of view which suggested them, 
and from which they naturally appear perfect; and 
every consideration which from other points of view 
might present itself, either as an objection or as a 
necessary modification, is to him as if it did not 
exist. When his merits come to be recognised and 
appreciated, and especially if he obtains disciples, 
the intellectual infirmity soon becomes complicated 
with a moral one. The natural result of the posi- 
tion is a gigantic self-confidence, not to say self- 
conceit. That of M. Comte is colossal. Except 
here and there in an entirely self-taught thinker, 
who has no high standard with which to compare 
himself, we have met with nothing approaching to 
it. As his thoughts grew more extravagant, his 
self-confidence grew more outrageous. The height 
it ultimately attained must be seen, in his writings, 
to be believed. 

The other circumstance of a personal nature 
which it is impossible not to notice, because M. 
Comte is perpetually referring to it as the origin of 
the great superiority which he ascribes to his later 
as compared with his earlier speculations, is the 
" moral regeneration " which he underwent from 
"une angelique influence" and "une incomparable 
passion privee." He formed a passionate attach- 



LATER SPECULATIONS 0E M. COMTE. 131 

ment to a lady whom lie describes as uniting every- 
thing which is morally with much that is intellect- 
ually admirable, and his relation to whom, besides 
the direct influence of her character upon his own, 
gave him an insight into the true sources of human 
happiness, which changed his whole conception of 
life. This attachment, which always remained 
pure, gave him but one year of passionate enjoy- 
ment, the lady having been cut off by death at the 
end of that short period ; but the adoration of her 
memory survived, and became, as we shall see, the 
type of his conception of the sympathetic culture 
proper for all human beings. The change thus 
effected in his personal character and sentiments, 
manifested itself at once in his speculations ; 
which, from having been only a philosophy, now 
aspired to become a religion ; and from having been 
as purely, and almost rudely, scientific and intel- 
lectual, as was compatible with a character always 
enthusiastic in its admirations and in its ardour for 
improvement, became from this time what, for want 
of a better name, may be called sentimental ; but 
sentimental in a way of its own, very curious to 
contemplate. In considering the system of religion, 
politics, and morals^ which in his later writings M. 
Comte constructed, it is not unimportant to bear in 
mind the nature of the personal experience and in- 
spiration to which he himself constantly attributed 
this phasis of his philosophy. But as we shall 
have much more to say against, than in favour of, 
the conclusions to which he was in this manner 
conducted, it is right to declare that, from the evi- 

9 * 



132 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

dence of his writings, we really believe the moral 
influence of Madame Clotilde de Vaux upon his 
character to have been of the ennobling as well as 
softening character which he ascribes to it. 
Making allowance for the effects of his exuberant 
growth in self-conceit, we perceive almost as much 
improvement in his feelings, as deterioration in his 
speculations, compared with those of the Philoso- 
phic Positive. Even the speculations are, in some 
secondary aspects, improved through the beneficial 
effect of the improved feelings ; and might have 
been more so, if, by a rare good fortune, the object 
of his attachment had been qualified to exercise as 
improving an influence over him intellectually as 
morally, and if he could have been contented with 
something less ambitious than being the supreme 
moral legislator and religious pontiff of the human 
race. 

When we say that M. Comte has erected his 
philosophy into a religion, the word religion must 
not be understood in its ordinary sense. He made 
no change in the purely negative attitude which 
he maintained towards theology : his religion is 
without a God. In saying this, we have done 
enough to induce nine-tenths of all readers, at 
least in our own country, to avert their faces and 
close their ears. To have no religion, though 
scandalous enough, is an idea they are partly used 
to : but to have no God, and to talk of religion, 
is to their feelings at once an absurdity and an 
impiety. Of the remaining tenth, a great propor- 
tion, perhaps, will turn away from anything which 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 13o 

calls itself by the name of religion at all. Between 
the two, it is difficult to find an audience who can 
be induced to listen to M. Comte without an in- 
surmountable prejudice. But, to be just to any 
opinion, it ought to be considered, not exclusively 
from an opponent's point of view, but from that of 
the mind which propounds it. Though conscious 
of being in an extremely small minority, we ven- 
ture to think that a religion may exist without 
belief in a God, and that a religion without a God 
may be, even to Christians, an instructive and pro- 
fitable object of contemplation. 

What, in truth, are the conditions necessary to 
constitute a religion ? There must be a creed, or 
. conviction, claiming authority over the whole of 
human life ; a belief, or set of beliefs, deliberately 
adopted, respecting human destiny and duty, to 
which the believer inwardly acknowledges that all 
his actions ought to be subordinate. Moreover, there 
must be a sentiment connected with this creed, or 
capable of being invoked by it, sufficiently powerful 
to give it in fact, the authority over human con- 
duct to which it lays claim in theory. It is a great 
advantage (though not absolutely indispensable) that 
this sentiment should crystallize, as it were, round 
a concrete object ; if possible a really existing one, 
though, in all the more important cases, only 
ideally present. Such an object Theism and Chris- 
tianity offer to the believer : but the condition 
may be fulfilled, if not in a manner strictly equiva- 
lent, by another object. It has been said that 
whoever believes in " the Infinite nature of Duty," 



134 LATER SPECULATIONS OP M. COMTE. 

even if he believe in nothing else, is religious. M. 
Comte believes in what is meant by the infinite 
nature of duty, but he refers the obligations of 
duty, as well as all sentiments of devotion, to a 
concrete object, at once ideal and real; the Human 
Race, conceived as a continuous whole, including 
the past, the present, and the future. This great 
collective existence, this " Grand Etre," as he 
terms it, though the feelings it can excite are 
necessarily very different from those which direct 
themselves towards an ideally perfect Being, has, 
as he forcibly urges, this advantage in respect to 
us, that it really needs our services, which Omni- 
potence cannot, in any genuine sense of the term, 
be supposed to do : and M. Comte says, that as- 
suming the existence of a Supreme Providence 
(which he is as far from denying as from affirm- 
ing), the best, and even the only, way in which we 
can rightly worship or serve Him, is by doing our 
utmost to love and serve that other Great Being, 
whose inferior Providence has bestowed on us all 
the benefits that we owe to the labours and virtues 
of former generations. It may not be consonant 
to usage to call this a religion ; but the term so 
applied has a meaning, and one which is not 
adequately expressed by any other word. Candid 
persons of all creeds may be willing to admit, that 
if a person has an ideal object, his attachment 
and sense of duty towards which are able to con- 
trol and discipline all his other sentiments and 
propensities, and prescribe to him a rule of life, 
that person has a religion : and though every one 



LATER SPECULATIONS OP M. COMTE. 135 

naturally prefers his own religion to any other, all 
must admit that if the object of this attachment, 
and of this feeling of duty, is the aggregate of our 
fellow-creatures, this Religion of the Infidel can- 
not, in honesty and conscience, be called an in- 
trinsically bad one. Many, indeed, may be unable 
to believe that this object is capable of gathering 
round it feelings sufficiently strong : but this is 
exactly the point on which a doubt can hardly re- 
main in an intelligent reader of M. Comte : and 
we join with him in contemning, as equally irra- 
tional and mean, the conception of human nature 
as incapable of giving its love and devoting its 
existence to any object which cannot afford in ex- 
change an eternity of personal enjoyment. 

The power which may be acquired over the 
mind by the idea of the general interest of the 
human race, both as a source of emotion and as a 
motive to conduct, many have perceived ; but we 
know not if any one, before M. Comte, realized so 
fully as he has done, all the majesty of which that 
idea is susceptible. It ascends into the unknown 
recesses of the past, embraces the manifold pre- 
sent, and descends into the indefinite and unfore- 
seeable future. Forming a collective Existence 
without assignable beginning or end, it appeals 
to that feeling of the Infinite, which is deeply 
rooted in human nature, and which seems neces- 
sary to the imposingness of all our highest con- 
ceptions. Of the vast unrolling web of human 
life, the part best known to us is irrevocably past ; 
this we can no longer serve, but can still love : it 



136 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

comprises for most of us the far greater number of 
those who have loved us, or from whom we have 
received benefits, as well as the long series of 
those who, by their labours and sacrifices for man- 
kind, have deserved to be held in everlasting and 
grateful remembrance. As M. Comte truly says, 
the highest minds, even now, live in thought with 
the great dead, far more than with the living ; 
and, next to the dead, with those ideal human 
beings yet to come, whom they are never destined 
to see. If we honour as we ought those who have 
served mankind in the past, we shall feel that we 
are also working for those benefactors by serving 
that to which their lives were devoted. And 
when reflection, guided by history, has taught us 
the intimacy of the connexion of every age of 
humanity with every other, making us see in the 
earthly destiny of mankind the playing out of a 
great drama, or the action of a prolonged epic, all 
the generations of mankind become indissolubly 
united into a single image, combining all the 
power over the mind of the idea of Posterity, with 
our best feelings towards the living world which 
surrounds us, and towards the predecessors who 
have made us what we are. That the ennobling 
power of this grand conception may have its full 
efficacy, we should, with M. Comte, regard the 
Grand Etre, Humanity, or Mankind, as composed, 
in the past, solely of those who, in every age and 
variety of position, have played their part worthily 
in life. It is only as thus restricted that the ag- 
gregate of our species becomes an object deserving 



LATEU SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 137 

our veneration. The unworthy members of it are 
best dismissed from our habitual thoughts ; and 
the imperfections which adhered through life, 
even to those of the dead who deserve honourable 
remembrance, should be no further borne in mind 
than is necessary not to falsify our conception of 
facts. On the other hand, the Grand Etre in its 
completeness ought to include not only all whom 
we venerate, but all sentient beings to which we 
owe duties, and which have a claim on our attach- 
ment. M. Comte, therefore, incorporates into the 
ideal object whose service is to be the law of our 
life, not our own species exclusively, but* in a 
subordinate degree, our humble auxiliaries, those 
animal races which enter into real society with 
man, which attach themselves to him, and volun- 
tarily co-operate with hiim like the noble dog who 
gives his life for his human friend and benefactor. 
For this M. Comte has been subjected to unworthy 
ridicule, but there is nothing truer or more hon- 
ourable to him in the whole body of his doctrines. 
The strong sense he always shows of the worth of 
the inferior animals, and of the duties of mankind 
towards them, is one of the very finest traits of his 
character. 

We, therefore, not only hold that M. Comte was 
justified in the attempt to develope his philosophy 
into a religion, and had realized the essential con- 
ditions of one, but that all other religions are made 
better in proportion as, in their practical result, 
they are brought to coincide with that which he 
aimed at constructing. But, unhappily, the next 






138 LATEH SPECULATIONS OP M. COMTE. 

thing we are obliged to do, is to charge him with 
making a complete mistake at the very ontset of 
his operations — with fundamentally misconceiving 
the proper office of a rule of life. He committed 
the error which is often, but falsely, charged 
against the whole class of utilitarian moralists ; 
he required that the test of conduct should also be 
the exclusive motive to it. Because the good of 
the human race is the ultimate standard of right 
and wrong, and because moral discipline consists in 
cultivating the utmost possible repugnance to all 
conduct injurious to the general good, M. Comte 
infers that the good of others is the only induce- 
ment on which we should allow ourselves to act ; 
and that we should endeavour to starve the whole 
of the desires which point to our personal satisfac- 
tion, by denying them all gratification not strictly 
required by physical necessities. The golden rule 
of morality, in M. Comte' s religion, is to live for 
others, " vivre pour autrui." To do as we would 
be done by, and to love our neighbour as ourself, 
are not sufficient for him : they partake, he thinks, 
of the nature of personal calculations. We should 
endeavour not to love ourselves at all. We shall 
not succeed in it, but we should make the nearest 
approach to it possible. Nothing less will satisfy 
him, as towards humanity, than the sentiment 
which one of his favourite writers, Thomas a 
Kempis, addresses to God : Amem te plus quam me, 
nee me nisi propter te. All education and all moral 
discipline should have but one object, to make 



LATER SPECULATIONS OE M. COMTE. 139 

altruism (a word of his own coining) predominate 
over egoism. If by this were only meant that 
egoism is bound, and should be taught, always to 
give way to the well-understood interests of 
enlarged altruism, no one who acknowledges any 
morality at all would object to the proposition. 
Eut M. Comte, taking his stand on the biological 
fact that organs are strengthened by exercise and 
atrophied by disuse, and firmly convinced that each 
of our elementary inclinations has its distinct 
cerebral organ, thinks it the grand duty of life not 
only to strengthen the social affections by constant 
habit and by referring all our actions to them, but, 
as far as possible, to deaden the personal passions 
and propensities by desuetude. Even the exercise 
of the intellect is required to obey as an authori- 
tative rule the dominion of the social feelings over 
the intelligence (du coeur sur l'esprit). The physi- 
cal and other personal instincts are to be mortified 
far beyond the demands of bodily health, which 
indeed the morality of the future is not to insist 
much upon, for fear of encouraging " les calculs 
personnels." M, Comte condemns only such 
austerities as, by diminishing the vigour of the 
constitution, make us less capable of being useful 
to others. Any indulgence, even in food, not 
necessary to health and strength, he condemns as 
immoral. All gratifications except those of the 
affections, are to be tolerated only as " inevitable 
infirmities." Novalis said of Spinoza that he was a 
God-intoxicated man : M. Comte is a moralitv- 



140 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

intoxicated man. Every question with him is one 
of morality, and no motive but that of morality is 
permitted. 

The explanation of this we find in an original 
mental twist, very common in French thinkers, 
and by which M. Comte was distinguished beyond 
them all. He could not dispense with what he 
called " unity." It was for the sake of Unity that 
a religion was, in his eyes, desirable. Not in the 
mere sense of Unanimity, but in a far wider one. 
A religion must be something by which to "system- 
atize " human life. His definition of it, in the 
" Catechisme," is "the state of complete unity 
which distinguishes our existence, at once personal 
and social, when all its parts, both moral and 
physical, converge habitually to a common destina- 
tion . . . Such a harmony, individual and collect- 
ive, being incapable of complete realization in an 
existence so complicated as ours, this definition of 
religion characterizes the immovable type towards 
which tends more and more the aggregate of human 
efforts. Our happiness and our merit consist 
especially in approaching as near as possible to this 
unity, of which the gradual increase constitutes the 
best measure of real improvement, personal or 
social." To this theme he continually returns, and 
argues that this unity or harmony among all the 
elements of our life is not consistent with the pre- 
dominance of the personal propensities, since these 
drag us in different directions ; it can only result 
from the subordination of them all to the social 
feelings, which may be made to act in a uniform 



LATEH SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 141 

direction by a common system of convictions, and 
which differ from the personal inclinations in this, 
that we all naturally encourage them in one an- 
other, while, on the contrary, social life is a per- 
petual restraint upon the selfish propensities. 

The fons errorwn in M. Comte's later specula- 
tions is this inordinate demand for " unity " and 
" systeinatization." This is the reason why it does 
not suffice to him that all should be ready, in case 
of need, to postpone their personal interests and 
inclinations to the requirements of the general 
good : he demands that each should regard as 
vicious any care at all for his personal interests, 
except as a means to the good of others — should be 
ashamed of it, should strive to cure himself of it, 
because his existence is not " systematized," is not 
in " complete unity," as long as he cares for more 
than one thing. The strangest part of the matter 
is, that this doctrine seems to M. Comte to be 
axiomatic. That all perfection consists in unity, 
he apparently considers to be a maxim which no 
sane man thinks of questioning. It never seems to 
enter into his conceptions that any one could object 
ah initio, and ask, why this universal systematizing, 
systematizing, systematizing ? Why is it necessary 
that all human life should point but to one object, 
and be cultivated into a system of means to a single 
end ? May it not be the fact that mankind, who 
after all are made up of single human beings, 
obtain a greater sum of happiness when each pur- 
sues his own, under the rules and conditions re- 
quired by the good of the rest, than when each 



142 LATER SPECULATIONS OE M. COMTE. 

makes the good of tlie rest his only subject, and 
allows himself no personal pleasures not indispens- 
able to the preservation of his faculties ? The 
regimen of a blockaded town should be cheerfully 
submitted to when high purposes require it, but is 
it the ideal perfection of human existence ? M. 
Comte sees none of these difficulties. The only 
true happiness, he affirms, is in the exercise of the 
affections. He had found it so for a whole year, 
which was enough to enable him to get to the 
bottom of the question, and to judge whether he 
could do without everything else. Of course the 
supposition was not to be heard of that any other 
person could require, or be the better for, what M. 
Comte did not value. " Unity " and " systematiza- 
tion " absolutely demanded that all other people 
should model themselves after M. Comte. It 
would never do to suppose that there could be more 
than one road to human happiness, or more than 
one ingredient in it. 

The most prejudiced must admit that this reli- 
gion without theology is not chargeable with relaxa- 
tion of moral restraints. On the contrary, it pro- 
digiously exaggerates them. It makes the same 
ethical mistake as the theory of Calvinism, that 
every act in life should be done for the glory of God, 
and that whatever is not a duty is a sin. It does 
not perceive that between the region of duty and 
that of sin there is an intermediate space, the re- 
gion of positive worthiness. It is not good that 
persons should be bound, by other people's opinion, 
to do everything that they would deserve praise for 



LATER SPECULATIONS OE M. COMTE. 143 

doing. There is a standard of altruism to which all 
should be required to come up, and a degree beyond 
it which is not obligatory, but meritorious. It is 
incumbent on every one to restrain the pursuit of 
his personal objects within the limits consistent with 
the essential interests of others. What those limits 
are, it is the province of ethical science to deter- 
mine ; and to keep all individuals and aggregations 
of individuals within them, is the proper office of 
punishment and of moral blame. If in addition to 
fulfilling this obligation, persons make the good of 
others a direct object of disinterested exertions, 
postponing or sacrificing to it even innocent personal 
indulgences, they deserve gratitude and honour, and 
are fit objects of moral praise. So long as they are 
in no way compelled to this conduct by any external 
pressure, there cannot be too much of it ; but a 
necessary condition is its spontaneity; since the 
notion of a happiness for all, procured by the self- 
sacrifice of each, if the abnegation is really felt to 
be a sacrifice, is a contradiction. Such spontaneity 
by no means excludes sympathetic encouragement ; 
but the encouragement should take the form of 
making self-devotion pleasant, not that of making 
everything else painful. The object should be to 
stimulate services to humanity by their natural re- 
wards ; not to render the pursuit of our own good 
in any other manner impossible, by visiting it with 
the reproaches of other and of our own conscience. 
The proper office of those sanctions is to enforce 
upon every one, the conduct necessary to give all 
other persons their fair chance: conduct which 



144 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

chiefly consists in not doing thein harm, and not 
impeding them in anything which without harming 
others does good to themselves. To this must of 
course be added, that when we either expressly or 
tacitly undertake to do more, we are bound to keep 
our promise. And inasmuch as every one, who 
avails himself of the advantages of society, leads 
others to expect from him all such positive good 
offices and disinterested services as the moral im- 
provement attained by mankind has rendered cus- 
tomary, he deserves moral blame if, without just 
cause, he disappoints that expectation. Through 
this principle the domain of moral duty is always 
widening. When what once was uncommon virtue 
becomes common virtue, it comes to be numbered 
among obligations, while a degree exceeding what 
has grown common, remains simply meritorious. 

M. Comte is accustomed to draw most of his 
ideas of moral cultivation from the discipline of the 
Catholic Church. Had he followed that guidance 
in the present case, he would have been less wide 
of the mark. For the distinction which we have 
drawn was fully recognized by the sagacious and 
far-sighted men who created the Catholic ethics. 
It is even one of the stock reproaches against 
Catholicism, that it has two standards of morality, 
and does not make obligatory on all Christians the 
highest rule of Christian perfection. It has one 
standard which, faithfully acted up to, suffices for 
salvation, another and a higher which when 
realized constitutes a saint. M. Comte, perhaps 
unconsciously, for there is nothing that he would 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 145 

have been more unlikely to do if lie had been aware 
of it, has taken a leaf out of the book of the de- 
spised Protestantism. Like the extreme Calvinists, 
he requires that all believers shall be saints, and 
damns then (after his own fashion) if they are not. 
Our conception of human life is different. We 
\ do not conceive life to be so rich in enjoyments, 
that it can afford to forego the cultivation of all 
those which address themselves to what M. Comte 
terms the egoistic propensities. On the contrary, 
we believe that a sufficient gratification of these, 
short of excess, but up to the measure which ren- 
ders the enjoyment greatest, is almost always 
favourable to the benevolent affections. The moral- 
ization of the personal enjoyments we deem to 
consist, not in reducing them to the smallest pos- 
sible amount, but in cultivating the habitual wish 
to share them with others, and with all others, and 
scorning to desire anything for oneself which is 
incapable of being so shared. There is only one 
passion or inclination which is permanently incom- 
patible with this condition — the love of domina- 
tion, or superiority, for its own sake ; which im- 
plies, and is grounded on, the equivalent depression 
of other people. As a rule of conduct, to be en- 
forced by moral sanctions, we think no more should 
be attempted than to prevent people from doing 
harm to others, or omitting to do such good as 
they have undertaken. Demanding no more than 
this, society, in any tolerable circumstances, obtains 
much more ; for the natural activity of human 
nature, shut out from all noxious directions, will 

10 



116 LATER SPECULATIONS OP M. COMTE. 

expand itself in nsefnl ones. This is our conception 
of the moral rule prescribed by the religion of Hu- 
manity. But above this standard there is an 
unlimited range of moral worth, up to the most 
exalted heroism, which should be fostered by every 
positive encouragement, though not converted into 
an obligation. It is as much a part of our scheme 
as of M. Comte's, that the direct cultivation of al- 
truism, and the subordination of egoism to it, far 
beyond the .point of absolute moral duty, should be 
one of the chief aims of education, both indi- 
vidual and collective. We even recognize the 
value, for this end, of ascetic discipline, in the 
original Greek sense of the word. We think with 
Dr Johnson, that he who has never denied himself 
anything which is not wrong, cannot be fully trust- 
ed for denying himself everything which is so. We 
do not doubt that children and young persons will 
one clay be again systematically disciplined in self- 
mortification ; that they will be taught, as in an- 
tiquity, to control their appetites, to brave dangers, 
and submit voluntarily to pain, as simple exercises 
in education. Something has been lost as well as 
gained by no longer giving to every citizen the 
training necessary for a soldier. Nor can any pains 
taken be too great, to form the habit, and develop 
the desire, of being useful to others and to the 
world, by the practice, independently of reward and 
of every personal consideration, of positive virtue 
beyond the bounds of prescribed duty. No efforts 
should be spared to associate the pupil's self-re- 
spect, and his desire of the respect of others, with 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 147 

service rendered to Humanity ; when possible, col- 
lectively, but at all events, what is always possible, 
in the persons of its individual members. There 
are many remarks and precepts in M. Comte' s 
volumes, which, as no less pertinent to our concep- 
tion of morality than to his, we fully accept. For 
example ; without admitting that to make " calculs 
personnels" is contrary to morality, we agree with 
him in the opinion, that the principal hygienic pre- 
cepts should be inculcated, not solely or principally 
as maxims of prudence, but as a matter of duty .to 
others, since by squandering our health we disable 
ourselves from rendering to our fellow-creatures 
the services to which they are entitled. As M. 
.Comte truly says, the prudential motive is by no 
means fully sufficient for the purpose, even physi- 
cians often disregarding their own precepts. The 
personal penalties of neglect of health are common- 
ly distant, as well as more or less uncertain, and 
require the additional and more immediate sanction 
of moral responsibility. M. Comte, therefore, in 
this instance, is, we conceive, right in principle ; 
though we have not the smallest doubt that he 
would have gone into extreme exaggeration in 
practice, and would have wholly ignored the legiti- 
mate liberty of the individual to judge for himself 
respecting his own bodily conditions, with due re- 
lation to the sufficiency of his means of knowledge, 
and taking the responsibility of the result. 

Connected with the same considerations is an- 
other idea of M. Comte, which has great beauty 

and grandeur in it, and the realization of which, 

10 * 



148 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

within the bounds of possibility, would be a culti- 
vation of the social feelings on a most essential 
point. It is, that every person who lives by any 
useful work, should be habituated to regard himself 
not as an individual working for his private benefit, 
but as a public functionary ; and his wages, of 
whatever sort, as not the remuneration or purchase- 
money of his labour, which should be given freely, 
but as the provision made by society to enable him 
to carry it on, and to replace the materials and pro- 
ducts which have been consumed in the process. 
M. Comte observes, that in modern industry every 
one in fact works much more for others than for 
himself, since his productions are to be consumed 
by others, and it is only necessary that his thoughts, 
and imagination should adapt themselves to the 
real state of the fact. The practical problem, how- 
ever, is not quite so simple, for a strong sense that 
he is working for others may lead to nothing better 
than feeling himself necessary to them, and instead 
of freely giving his commodity, may only encour- 
age him to put a high price upon it. What M. 
Comte really means is that we should regard work- 
ing for the benefit of others as a good in itself; 
that we should desire it for its own sake, and not 
for the sake of remuneration, which cannot justly 
be claimed for doing what we like : that the proper 
return for a service to society is the gratitude of 
society : and that the moral claim of any one in 
regard to the provision for his personal wants, is 
not a question of quid pro quo in respect to his co- 
operation, but of how much the circumstances of 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 149 

society permit to be assigned to him, consistently 
with the just claims of others. To this opinion we 
entirely subscribe. The rough method of settling 
the labourer's share of the produce, the compe- 
tition of the market, may represent a practical 
necessity, but certainly not a moral ideal. Its de- 
fence is, that civilization has not hitherto been 
equal to organizing anything better than this first 
rude approach to an equitable distribution. Hude 
as it is, we for the present go less wrong by leaving 
the thing to settle itself, than by settling it artifi- 
cially in any mode which has yet been tried. But 
in whatever manner that question may ultimately 
be decided, the true moral and social idea of Labour 
is in no way affected by it. Until labourers and 
employers perform the work of industry in the 
spirit in which soldiers perform that of an army, 
industry will never be moralized, and military life 
will remain, what, in spite of the anti-social cha- 
racter of its direct object, it has hitherto been— the 
chief school of moral co-operation. 

Thus far of the general idea of M. Comte's 
ethics and religion. We must now say something 
of the details. Here we approach the ludicrous 
side of the subject : but we shall unfortunately 
have to relate other things far more really ridi- 
culous. 

There cannot be a religion without a cultus. 
We use this term for want of any other, for its 
nearest equivalent, worship, suggests a different 
order of ideas. We mean by it, a set of systematic 
observances, intended to cultivate and maintain the 



150 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

religious sentiment. Though M. Comte justly ap- 
preciates the superior efficacy of acts, in keeping 
up and strengthening the feeling which prompts 
them, over any mode whatever of mere expression, 
he takes pains to organize the latter also with great 
minuteness. He provides an equivalent both for 
the private devotions, and for the public cere- 
monies, of other faiths. The reader will be sur- 
prised to learn, that the former consists of prayer. 
But prayer, as understood by M. Comte, does not 
mean asking ; it is a mere outpouring of feeling ; 
and for this view of it he claims the authority of 
the Christian mystics. It is not to be addressed to 
the Grand Etre, to collective Humanity ; though 
he occasionally carries metaphor so far as to style 
this a goddess. The honours to collective Hu- 
manity are reserved for the public celebrations. 
Private adoration is to be addressed to it in the 
persons of worthy individual representatives, who 
may be either living or dead, but must in all cases 
be women ; for women, being the sexe aimant, re- 
present the best attribute of humanity, that which 
ought to regulate all human life, nor can Humanity 
possibly be symbolized in any form but that of a 
woman. The objects of private adoration are the 
mother, the wife, and the daughter, representing 
severally the past, the present, and the future, and 
calling into active exercise the three social senti- 
ments, veneration, attachment, and kindness. We 
are to regard them, whether dead or alive, as our 
guardian angels, " les vrais anges gardiens." If 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 151 

the last two have never existed, or if, in the parti- 
cular casa, any of the three types is too faulty for 
the office assigned to it, their place may be sup- 
plied by some other type of womanly excellence, 
even by one merely historical. Be the object living 
or dead, the adoration (as we understand it) is to 
be addressed only to the idea. The prayer consists 
of two parts ; a commemoration, followed by an 
effusion. By a commemoration M. Comte means 
an effort of memory and imagination, summoning 
up with the utmost possible vividness the image of 
the object : and every artifice is exhausted to ren- 
der the image as life-like, as close to the reality, as 
near an approach to actual hallucination, as is con- 
sistent with sanity. This degree of intensity having 
been, as far as practicable, attained, the effusion 
follows. Every person should compose his own 
form of prayer, which should be repeated not men- 
tally only, but orally, and may be added to or varied 
for sufficient cause, but never arbitrarily. It may 
be interspersed with passages from the best poets, 
when they present themselves spontaneously, as 
giving a felicitous expression to the adorer's own 
feeling. These observances M. Comte practised to 
the memory of his Clotilde, and he enjoins them on 
all true believers. They are to occupy two hours 
of every day, divided into three parts ; at rising, in 
the middle of the working hours, and in bed at 
night. The first, which should be in a kneeling 
attitude, will commonly be the longest, and the 
second the shortest. The third is to be extended 



152 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

as nearly as possible to the moment of falling 
asleep, that its effect may be felt in disciplining 
even the dreams. 

The jmblic cultus consists of a series of celebra- 
tions or festivals, eighty-four in the year, so ar- 
ranged that at least one occurs in every week. 
They are devoted to the successive glorification 
of Humanity itself; of the various ties, political 
and domestic, among mankind ; of the successive 
stages in the past evolution of our species ; and of 
the several classes into which M. Comte's polity 
divides mankind. M. Comte's religion has, more- 
over, nine Sacraments ; consisting in the solemn 
consecration, by the priests of Humanity, with 
appropriate exhortations, of all the great transi- 
tions in life ; the entry into life itself, and into 
each of its successive stages : education, marriage, 
the choice of a profession, and so forth. Among 
these is death, which receives the name of trans- 
formation, and is considered as a passage from ob- 
jective existence to subjective — to living in the 
memory of our fellow- creatures. Having no eter- 
nity of objective existence to offer, M. Comte's re- 
ligion gives it all he can, by holding out the hope 
of subjective immortality — of existing in the re- 
membrance and in the posthumous adoration of 
mankind at large, if we have done anything to 
deserve remembrance from them ; at all events, 
of those whom we loved during life ; and when 
they too are gone, of being included in the col- 
lective adoration paid to the Grand Etre. People 
are to be taught to look forward to this as a suffi- 



LATEPv SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 153 

cient recompense for the devotion of a whole life 
to the service of Humanity. Seven years after 
death, comes the last Sacrament : a public judg- 
ment, by the priesthood, on the memory of the 
defunct. This is not designed for purposes of re- 
probation, but of honour, and any one may, by 
declaration during life, exempt himself from it. 
If judged, and found worthy, he is solemnly in- 
corporated with the Grand Etre, and his remains 
are transferred from the civil to the religious place 
of sepulture : " le bois sacre qui doit entourer 
chaque temple de 1' HumaniteV' 

This brief abstract gives no idea of the minute- 
ness of M. Comte's prescriptions, and the extra- 
ordinary height to which he carries the mania for 
regulation by which Frenchmen are distinguished 
among Europeans, and M. Comte among French- 
men. It is this which throws an irresistible air 
of ridicule over the whole subject. There is no- 
thing really ridiculous in the devotional practices 
which M. Comte recommends towards a cherished 
memory or an ennobling ideal, when they come un- 
prompted from the depths of the individual feel- 
ing ; but there is something ineffably ludicrous in 
enjoining that everybody shall practise them three 
times daily for a period of two hours, not because 
his feelings require them, but for the premeditated 
purpose of getting his feelings up. The ludicrous, 
however, in any of its shapes, is a phenomenon 
with which M. Comte seems to have been totally 
unacquainted. There is nothing in his writings 
from which it could be inferred that he knew of 



154 LATEU SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

the existence of such things as wit and humour. 
The only writer distinguished for either, of whom 
he shows any admiration, is Moliere, and him he 
admires not for his wit but for his wisdom. We 
notice this without intending any reflection on M. 
Comte ; for a profound conviction raises a person 
above the feeling of ridicule. Eut there are pas- 
sages in his writings which, it really seems to us, 
could have been written by no man who had ever 
laughed. We will give one of these instances. 
Besides the regular prayers, M. Comte's religion, 
like the Catholic, has need of forms which can be 
applied to casual and unforeseen occasions. These, 
he says, must in general be left to the believer's 
own choice ; but he suggests as a very suitable 
one the repetition of " the fundamental formula of 
Positivism," viz., ct l'amour pour principe, l'ordre 
pour base, et le progres pour but." Not content, 
however, with an equivalent for the Paters and 
Aves of Catholicism, he must have one for the sign 
of the cross also; and he thus delivers himself:* 
" Cette expansion peut etre perfectionn^e par des 
signes universels. . . . Ann de mieux deVelop- 
per l'aptitude n^cessaire de la formule positiviste 
a repr^senter toujoursla condition humaine, il con- 
vient ordinairement de l'enoncer en touchant suc- 
cessivement les principaux organes que la th^orie 
cerebrale assigne a ses trois elements." This may 
be a very appropriate mode of expressing one's de- 
votion to the Grand Etre : but any one who had 
appreciated its effect on the profane reader, would 

•"■ Systeme de Politique Positive, iv. 100. 



LATER SPECULATIONS OE M. COMTE. 155 

have thought it judicious to keep it back till a con- 
siderably more advanced stage in the propagation 
of the Positive Religion. 

As M. Comte's religion has a cultus, so also it 
has a clergy, who are the pivot of his entire social 
and political system. Their nature and office will 
be best shown by describing his ideal of political 
society in its normal state, with the various classes 
of which it is composed. 

The necessity of a Spiritual Power, distinct and 
separate from the temporal government, is the es- 
sential principle of M. Comte's political scheme; 
as it may well be, since the Spiritual Power is the 
only counterpoise he provides or tolerates, to the 
absolute dominion of the civil rulers. Nothing can 
exceed his combined detestation and contempt for 
government by assemblies, and for parliamentary 
or representative institutions in any form. They 
are an expedient, in his opinion, only suited to a 
state of transition, and even that nowhere but in 
England. The attempt to naturalize them in 
Prance, or any Continental nation, he regards as 
mischievous quackery. Louis Napoleon's usurpa- 
tion is absolved, is made laudable to him, because 
it overthrew a representative government. Elec- 
tion of superiors by inferiors, except as a revolu- 
tionary expedient, is an abomination in his sight. 
Public functionaries of all kinds should name their 
successors, subject to the approbation of their own 
superiors, and giving public notice of # the nomina- 
tion so long beforehand as to admit of discussion, 
and the timely revocation of a wrong choice. But, 



15G LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

by the side of the temporal rulers, he places an- 
other authority, with no power to command, but 
only to advise and remonstrate. The family being, 
in his mind as in that of Frenchmen generally, the 
foundation and essential type of all society, the 
separation of the two powers commences there. 
The spiritual, or moral and religious power, in a 
family, is the women of it. The positivist family 
is composed of the " fundamental couple," their 
children, and the parents of the man, if alive. The 
whole government of the household, except as re- 
gards the education of the children, resides in the 
man ; and even over that he has complete power, 
but should forbear to exert it. The part assigned 
to the women is to improve the man through his 
affections, and to bring up the children, who, until 
the age of fourteen, at which scientific instruction 
begins, are to be educated wholly by their mother. 
That women may be better fitted for these functions, 
they are peremptorily excluded from all others. 
No woman is to work for her living. Every 
woman is to be supported by her husband or her 
male relations, and if she has none of these, by the 
State. She is to have no powers of government, 
even domestic, and no property. Her legal rights 
of inheritance are preserved to her, that her feel- 
ings of duty may make her voluntarily forego them. 
There are to be no marriage portions, that women 
may no longer be sought in marriage from inter- 
ested motives. Marriages are to be rigidly indis- 
soluble, except for a single cause. It is remarkable 
that the bitterest enemy of divorce among all philo- 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 157 

sopliers, nevertheless allows it, in a case which the 
laws of England, and of other countries reproached 
by him with tolerating divorce, do not admit : 
namely, when one of the parties has been sentenced 
to an infamizing punishment, involving loss of civil 
rights. It is monstrous that condemnation, even 
for life, to a felon's punishment, should leave an 
unhappy victim bound to, and in the wife's case 
under the legal authority of, the culprit. M. 
Comte could feel for the injustice in this special 
case, because it chanced to be the unfortunate 
situation of his Clotilde. Minor degrees of un- 
worthiness may entitle the innocent party to a 
legal separation, but without the power of re-mar- 
riage. Second marriages, indeed, are not permitted 
by the Positive Heligion. There is to be no im- 
pediment to them by law, but morality is to con- 
demn them, and every couple who are married 
religiously as well as civilly are to make a vow of 
eternal widowhood, "le veuvage eternel." This 
absolute monogamy is, in M. Comte's opinion, es- 
sential to the complete fusion between two beings, 
which is the essence of marriage ; and moreover, 
eternal constancy is required by the posthumous 
adoration, which is to be continuously paid by the 
survivor to one who, though objectively dead, still 
lives " subjectively." The domestic spiritual power, 
which resides in the women of the family, is chiefly 
concentrated in the most venerable of them, the 
husband's mother, while alive. It has an auxiliary 
in the influence of age, represented by the hus- 
band's father, who is supposed to have passed the 



158 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

period of retirement from active life, fixed by M. 
Comte (for lie fixes everything) at sixty-three ; at 
which age the head of the family gives up the reins 
of authority to his son, retaining only a consulta- 
tive voice. 

This domestic Spiritual Power, being prin- 
cipally moral, and confined to a private life, re- 
quires the support and guidance of an intellectual 
power exterior to it, the sphere of which will 
naturally be wider, extending also to public life. 
This consists of the clergy, or priesthood, for M. 
Comte is fond of borrowing the consecrated ex- 
pressions of Catholicism to denote the nearest 
equivalents which his own system affords. The 
clergy are the theoretic or philosophical class, and 
are supported by an endowment from the State, 
voted periodically, but administered by themselves. 
Like women, they are to be excluded from all 
riches, and from all participation in power (except 
the absolute power of each over his own house- 
hold). They are neither to inherit, nor to receive 
emolument from any of their functions, or from 
their writings or teachings of any description, but 
are to live solely on their small salaries. This M. 
Comte deems necessary to the complete disinter- 
estedness of their counsel. To have the confidence 
of the masses, they must, like the masses, be poor. 
Their exclusion from political and from all other 
practical occupations is indispensable for the same 
reason, and for others equally peremptory. Those 
occupations are, he contends, incompatible with 
the habits of mind necessary to philosophers. A 



LATER SPECULATIONS OP M. COMTE. 159 

practical position, either private or public, chains 
the mind to specialities and details, while a phi- 
losopher's business is with general truths and con- 
nected views (vues d'ensemble). These, again, 
require an habitual abstraction from details, which 
unfits the mind for judging well and rapidly of in- 
dividual cases. The same person cannot be both a 
good theorist and a good practitioner or ruler, 
though practitioners and rulers ought to have a 
solid theoretic education. The two kinds of func- 
tion must be absolutely exclusive of one another : 
to attempt them both, is inconsistent with fitness 
for either. But as men may mistake their vocation, 
up to the age of thirty-five they are allowed to 
change their career. 

To the clergy is entrusted the theoretic or scien- 
tific instruction of youth. The medical art also is 
to be in their hands, since no one is fit to be a 
physician who does not study and understand the 
whole man, moral as well as physical. M. Comte 
has a contemptuous opinion of the existing race of 
physicians, who, he says, deserve no higher name 
than that of veterinaires, since they concern them- 
selves with man only in his animal, and not in his 
human character. In his last years, M. Comte (as 
we learn from Dr Hobinet's volume) indulged in 
the wildest speculations on medical science, declar- 
ing all maladies to be one and the same disease, 
the disturbance or destruction of " 1' unit e* cere- 
brale." The other functions of the clergy are 
moral, much more than intellectual. They are the 
spiritual directors, and venerated advisers, of the 



160 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

active or practical classes, including the political. 
They are the mediators in all social differences ; 
between the labourers, for instance, and their em- 
ployers. They are to advise and admonish on all 
important violations of the moral law. Especially, 
it devolves on them to keep the rich and powerful 
to the performance of their moral duties towards 
their inferiors. If private remonstrance fails, pub- 
lic denunciation is to follow : in extreme cases they 
may proceed to the length of excommunication, 
which, though it only operates through opinion, 
yet if it carries opinion with it, may, as M. Comte 
complacently observes, be of such powerful efficacy, 
that the richest man may be driven to produce his 
subsistence by his own manual labour, through the 
impossibility of inducing any other person to work 
for him. In this as in all other cases, the priest- 
hood depends for its authority on carrying with it 
the mass of the people — those who, possessing no 
accumulations, live on the wages of daily labour ; 
popularly but incorrectly termed the working 
classes, and by French writers, in their Iloman law 
phraseology, proletaires. These, therefore, who are 
not allowed the smallest political rights, are incorpor- 
ated into the Spiritual Power, of which they form, 
after women and the clergy, the third element. 

It remains to give an account of the Temporal 
Power, composed of the rich and the employers of 
labour, two classes who in M. Comte' s system are 
reduced to one, for he allows of no idle rich. A life 
made up of mere amusement and self-indulgence, 
though not interdicted by law, is to be deemed so 



LATER SPECULATIONS OP M. COMTE. 161 

disgraceful, that nobody with the smallest sense of 
shame would choose to be guilty of it. Here, we 
think, M. Comte has lighted on a true principle, to- 
wards which the tone of opinion in modern Europe 
is more and more tending, and which is destined to 
be one of the constitutive principles of regenerated 
society. We believe, for example, with him, that 
in the future there will be no class of landlords 
living at ease on their rents, but every landlord 
will be a capitalist trained to agriculture, himself 
superintending and directing the cultivation of his 
estate. No one but he who guides the work, should 
have the control of the tools. In M. Comte' s 
system, the rich, as a rule, consist of the " captains 
of industry :" but the rule is not entirely without 
exception, for M. Comte recognizes other useful 
modes of employing riches. In particular, one of 
his favourite ideas is that of an order of Chivalry, 
composed of the most generous and self-devoted of 
the rich, voluntarily dedicating themselves, like 
knights-errant of old, to the redressing of wrongs, 
and the protection of the weak and oppressed. He 
remarks, that oppression, in modern life, can sel- 
dom reach, or even venture to attack, the life or 
liberty of its victims (he forgets the case of domes- 
tic tyranny), but only their pecuniary means, and 
it is therefore by the purse chiefly that individuals 
can usefully interpose, as they formerly did by the 
sword. The occupation, however, of nearly all the 
rich, will be the direction of labour, and for this 
work they will be educated. Reciprocally, it is in 

M. Comte' s opinion essential, that all directors of 

11 



162 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

labour should be rich. Capital (in which he in- 
cludes land) should be concentrated in a few 
holders, so that every capitalist may conduct the 
most extensive operations which one mind is capa- 
ble of superintending. This is not only demanded 
by good economy, in order to take the utmost 
advantage of a rare kind of practical ability, but it 
necessarily follows from the principle of M. 
Comte's scheme, which regards a capitalist as a 
public functionary. M. Comte's conception of the 
relation of capital to society is essentially that of 
Socialists, but he would bring about by education 
and opinion, what they aim at effecting by positive 
institution. The owner of capital is by no means 
to consider himself its absolute proprietor. Legally 
he is not to be controlled in his dealings with it, 
for power should be in proportion to responsibility : 
but it does not belong to him for his own use ; he 
is merely entrusted by society with a portion of 
the accumulations made by the past providence of 
mankind, to be administered for the benefit of the 
present generation and of posterity, under the obli- 
gation of preserving them unimpaired, and handing 
them down, more or less augmented, to our success- 
ors. He is not entitled to dissipate them, or 
divert them from the service of Humanity to his 
own pleasures. Nor has he a moral right to con- 
sume on himself the whole even of his profits. He 
is bound in conscience, if they exceed his reason- 
able wants, to employ the surplus in improving 
either the efficiency of his operations, or the physi- 
cal and mental condition of his labourers. The 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 163 

portion of his gains which he may appropriate 
to his own use, must be decided by himself, under 
accountability to opinion ; and opinion ought not 
to look very narrowly into the matter, nor hold him 
to a rigid reckoning for any moderate indulgence of 
luxury or ostentation ; since under the great re- 
sponsibilities that will be imposed on him, the posi- 
tion of an employer of labour will be so much less 
desirable, to any one in whom the instincts of pride 
and vanity are not strong, than the " heureuse 
insouciance " of a labourer, that those instincts 
must be to a certain degree indulged, or no one 
would undertake the office. With this limitation, 
every employer is a mere administrator of his pos- 
sessions, for his work-people and for society at large. 
If he indulges himself lavishly, without reserving 
an ample remuneration for all who are employed 
under him, he is morally culpable, and will incur 
sacerdotal admonition. This state of things neces- 
sarily implies that capital should be in few hands, 
because, as M. Comte observes, without great 
riches, the obligations which society ought to 
impose, could not be fulfilled without an amount 
of personal abnegation that it would be hopeless to 
expect. If a person is conspicuously qualified for 
the conduct of an industrial enterprise, but desti- 
tute of the fortune necessary for undertaking it, M. 
Comte recommends that he should be enriched by 
subscription, or, in cases of sufficient importance, 
by the State. Small landed proprietors and capital- 
ists, and the middle classes altogether, he regards 

as a parasitic growth, destined to disappear, the best 

11 * 



164 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

of the body becoming large capitalists, and the re- 
mainder proletaires. Society will consist only of 
rich and poor, and it will be the business of the 
rich to make the best possible lot for the poor. 
The remuneration of the labourers will continue, 
as at present, to be a matter of voluntary arrange- 
ment between them and their employers, the last 
resort on either side being refusal of co-operation, 
" refus de concours," in other words, a strike or a 
lock-out ; with the sacerdotal order for mediators 
in case of need. But though wages are to be an 
affair of free contract, their standard is not to be 
the competition of the market, but the application 
of the products in equitable proportion between 
the wants of the labourers and the wants and dig- 
nity of the employer. As it is one of M. Comte's 
principles that a question cannot be usefully pro- 
posed without an attempt at a solution, he gives his 
ideas from the beginning as to what the normal in- 
come of a labouring family should be. They are 
on such a scale, that until some great extension 
shall have taken place in the scientific resources of 
mankind, it is no wonder he thinks it necessary to 
limit as much as possible the number of those who 
are to be supported by what is left of the pro- 
duce. In the first place the labourer's dwelling, 
which is to consist of seven rooms, is, with all 
that it contains, to be his own property : it is 
the only landed property he is allowed to possess, 
but every family should be the absolute owner of 
all things which are destined for its exclusive use. 
Lodging being thus independently provided for, 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 165 

and education and medical attendance being se- 
cured gratuitously by the general arrangements 
of society, the pay of the labourer is to consist 
of two portions, the one monthly, and of fixed 
amount, the other weekly, and proportioned to 
the produce of his labour. The former M. Comte 
fixes at 100 francs (£4) for a month of 28 days ; 
being £52 a year : and the rate of piece-work 
should be such as to make the other part amount 
to an average of seven francs (5s. 6d.) per work- 
ing day. 

Agreeably to M. Comte's rule, that every pub- 
lic functionary should appoint his successor, the 
capitalist has unlimited power of transmitting his 
capital by gift or bequest, after his own death or 
retirement. In general it will be best bestowed 
entire upon one person, unless the business will 
advantageously admit of subdivision. He will 
naturally leave it to one or more of his sons, if 
sufficiently qualified ; and rightly so, hereditary 
being, in M. Comte's opinion, preferable to ac- 
quired wealth, as being usually more generously 
administered. But, merely as his sons, they have 
no moral right to it. M. Comte here recognizes 
another of the principles, on which we believe that 
the constitution of regenerated society will rest. 
He maintains (as others in the present generation 
have done) that the father owes nothing to his 
son, except a good education, and pecuniary aid 
sufficient for an advantageous start in life : that 
he is entitled, and may be morally bound, to leave 
the bulk of his fortune to some other properly 



166 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

selected person or persons, whom he judges likely 
to make a more beneficial use of it. This is the 
first of three important points, in which M. Comte's 
theory of the family, wrong as we deem it in its 
foundations, is in advance of prevailing theories 
and existing institutions. The second is the re-in- 
troduction of adoption, not only in default of chil- 
dren, hut to fulfil the purposes, and satisfy the sym- 
pathetic wants, to which such children as there are 
may happen to be inadequate. The third is a 
most important point — the incorporation of domes- 
tics as substantive members of the family. There 
is hardly any part of the present constitution of 
society more essentially vicious, and morally in- 
jurious to both parties, than the relation between 
masters and servants. To make this a really hu- 
man and a moral relation, is one of the principal 
desiderata in social improvement. The feeling of 
the vulgar of all classes, that domestic service has 
anything in it peculiarly mean, is a feeling than 
which there is none meaner. In the feudal ages, 
youthful nobles of the highest rank thought them- 
selves honoured by officiating in what is now 
called a menial capacity, about the persons of 
superiors of both sexes, for whom they felt re- 
spect : and, as M. Comte observes, there are many 
families who can in no other way so usefully 
serve Humanity, as by ministering to the bodily 
wants of other families, called to functions which 
require the devotion of all their thoughts. We 
will add, by way of supplement to M. Comte's 
doctrine, that much of the daily physical work of 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 167 

a household, even in opulent families, if silly 
notions of degradation, common to all ranks, did 
not interfere, might very advantageously be per- 
formed by the family itself, at least by its younger 
members ; to whom it would give healthful exer- 
cise of the bodily powers, which has now to be 
sought in modes far less useful, and also a familiar 
acquaintance with the real work of the world, and 
a moral willingness to take their share of its 
burthens, which, in the great majority of the 
better-off classes, do not now get cultivated at all. 

We have still to speak of the directly political 
functions of the rich, or, as M. Comte terms them, 
the patriciate. The entire political government is 
to be in their hands. Pirst, however, the existing 
nations are to be broken up into small republics, 
the largest not exceeding the size of Belgium, 
Portugal, or Tuscany ; any larger nationalities 
being incompatible with the unity of wants and 
feelings, which is required, not only to give due 
strength to the sentiment of patriotism (always 
strongest in small states), but to prevent undue 
compression; for no territory, M. Comte thinks, 
can without oppression be governed from a distant 
centre. Algeria, therefore, is to be given up to 
the Arabs, Corsica to its inhabitants, and Prance 
proper is to be, before the end of the century, 
divided into seventeen republics, corresponding to 
the number of considerable towns : Paris, however, 
(need it be said?) succeeding to Rome as the 
religious metropolis of the world. Ireland, Scot- 
land, and Wales, are to be separated from England, 



168 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

which is of course to detach itself from all its 
transmarine dependencies. In each state thus con- 
stituted, the powers of government are to be vested 
in a triumvirate of the three principal bankers, 
who are to take the foreign, home, and financial 
departments respectively. How they are to con- 
duct the government and remain bankers, does not 
clearly appear ; but it must be intended that they 
should combine both offices, for they are to receive 
no pecuniary remuneration for the political one. 
Their power is to amount to a dictatorship (M. 
Comte's own word) : and he is hardly justified in 
saying that he gives political power to the rich, 
since he gives it over the rich and every one else, 
to three individuals of the number, not even chosen 
by the rest, but named by their predecessors. As 
a check on the dictators, there is to be complete 
freedom of speech, writing, printing, and voluntary 
association ; and all important acts of the govern- 
ment, except in cases of emergency, are to be 
announced sufficiently long beforehand to ensure 
ample discussion. This, and the influences of the 
Spiritual Power, are the only guarantees provided 
against misgovernment. When we consider that 
the complete dominion of every nation of mankind 
is thus handed over to only four men — for the 
Spiritual Power is to be under the absolute and 
undivided control of a single Pontiff for the whole 
human race — one is appalled at the picture of 
entire subjugation and slavery, which is recom- 
mended to us as the last and highest result of the 
evolution of Humanity. But the conception rises 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 169 

to the terrific, when we are told the mode in which 
the single High Priest of Humanity is intended to 
use his authority. It is the most warning example 
we know, into what frightful aberrations a powerful 
and comprehensive mind may be led by the ex- 
clusive following out of a single idea. 

The single idea of M. Comte, on this subject, 
is that the intellect should be wholly subordinated 
to the feelings ; or, to translate the meaning out of 
sentimental into logical language, that the exercise 
of the intellect, as of all our other faculties, should 
have for its sole object the general good. Every 
other employment of it should be accounted not 
only idle and frivolous, but morally culpable. 
Being indebted wholly to Humanity for the culti- 
vation to which we owe our mental powers, we are 
bound in return to consecrate them wholly to her 
service. Having made up his mind that this ought 
to be, there is with M. Comte but one step to con- 
cluding that the Grand Pontiff of Humanity must 
take care that it shall be ; and on this foundation 
he organizes an elaborate system for the total 
suppression of all independent thought. He does 
not, indeed, invoke the arm of the law, or call for 
any prohibitions. The clergy are to have no 
monopoly. Any one else may cultivate science if 
he can, may write and publish if he can find 
readers, may give private instruction if anybody 
consents to receive it. But since the sacerdotal 
body will absorb into itself all but those whom it 
deems either intellectually or morally unequal to 
the vocation, all rival teachers will, as he calculates, 



170 LATEll SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

be so discredited beforehand, that their competition 
will not be formidable. Within the body itself, 
the High Priest has it in his power to make sure 
that there shall be no opinions, and no exercise of 
mind, but such as he approves; for he alone 
decides the duties and local residence of all its 
members, and can even eject them from the body. 
Before electing to be under this rule, we feel a 
natural curiosity to know in what manner it is to 
be exercised. Humanity has only yet had one 
Pontiff, whose mental qualifications for the post 
are not likely to be often surpassed, M. Comte 
himself. It is of some importance to know what 
are the ideas of this High Priest, concerning the 
moral and religious government of the human 
intellect. 

One of the doctrines which M. Comte most 
strenuously enforces in his later writings is, that 
during the preliminary evolution of humanity, 
terminated by the foundation jof Positivism, the 
free development of our forces of all kinds was the 
important matter, but that from this time forward 
the principal need is to regulate them. Formerly 
the danger was of their being insufficient, but 
henceforth, of their being abused. Let us express, 
in passing, our entire dissent from this doctrine. 
Whoever thinks that the wretched education which 
mankind as yet receive, calls forth their mental 
powers (except those of a select few) in a sufficient 
or even tolerable degree, must be very easily 
satisfied : and the abuse of them, far from becoming 
proportionally greater as knowledge and mental 



LATER SPECULATIONS OP M. COMTE. 171 

capacity increase, becomes rapidly less, provided 
always that the diffusion of those qualities keeps 
pace with their growth. The abuse of intellectual 
power is only to be dreaded, when society is divided 
between a few highly cultivated intellects and an 
ignorant and stupid multitude. But mental power 
is a ^thing which M. Comte does not want — or 
wants infinitely less than he wants submission and 
obedience. Of all the ingredients of human nature, 
he continually says, the intellect most needs to be 
disciplined and reined-in. It is the most turbulent 
" le plus perturbateur," of all the mental elements ; 
more so than even the selfish instincts. Through- 
out the whole modern transition, beginning with 
ancient Greece (for M. Comte tells us that we have 
always been in a state of revolutionary transition 
since then), the intellect has been in a state of 
systematic insurrection against " le coeur." The 
metaphysicians and literati (lettres), after help- 
ing to pull down the old religion and social 
order, are rootedly hostile to the construction of the 
new, and desiring only to prolong the existing 
scepticism and intellectual anarchy, which secure 
to them a cheap social ascendancy, without the 
labour of earning it by solid scientific preparation. 
The scientific class, from whom better might have 
been expected, are, if possible, worse. Void of 
enlarged views, despising all that is too large for 
their comprehension, devoted exclusively each to 
his special science, contemptuously indifferent to 
moral and political interests, their sole aim is to 
acquire an easy reputation, and in France (through 



172 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

paid Academies and professorships) personal lucre, 
by pushing their sciences into idle and useless 
inquiries (speculations oiseuses), of no value to the 
real interests of mankind, and tending to divert 
the thoughts from them. One of the duties most 
incumbent on opinion and on the Spiritual Power, 
is to stigmatize as immoral, and effectually sup- 
press, these useless employments of the speculative 
faculties. All exercise of thought should be ab- 
stained from, which has not some beneficial 
tendency, some actual utility to mankind. M. 
Comte, of course, is not the man to say that it 
must be a merely material utility. If a specula- 
tion, though it has no doctrinal, has a logical 
value — if it throws any light on universal Method — 
it is still more deserving of cultivation than if its 
usefulness was merely practical : but, either as 
method or as doctrine, it must bring forth fruits to 
Humanity, otherwise it is not only contemptible, 
but criminal. 

That there is a portion of truth at the bottom 
of all this, we should be the last to deny. No 
respect is due to any employment of the intellect 
which does not tend to the good of mankind. It is 
precisely on a level with any idle amusement, and 
should be condemned as waste of time, if carried 
beyond the limit within which amusement is per- 
missible. And whoever devotes powers of thought 
which could render to Humanity services it ur- 
gently needs, to speculations and studies which it 
could dispense with, is liable to the discredit at- 
taching to a well-grounded suspicion of caring 



LATER SPECULATIONS OE M. COMTE. 173 

little for Humanity. But who can affirm positively 
of any speculations, guided by right scientific 
methods, on subjects really accessible to the hu- 
man faculties, that they are incapable of being of 
any use ? Nobody knows what knowledge will 
prove to be of use, and what is destined to be use- 
less. The most that can be said is that some kinds 
are of more certain, and above all, of more present 
utility than others. How often the most import- 
ant practical results have been the remote con- 
sequence of studies which no one would have 
expected to lead to them ! Could the mathema- 
ticians, who, in the schools of Alexandria, inves- 
tigated the properties of the ellipse, have foreseen 
that nearly two thousand years afterwards their 
speculations would explain the solar system, and 
a little later would enable ships safely to circum- 
navigate the earth ? Even in M. Comte's opinion, 
it is well for mankind that, in those early days, 
knowledge was thought worth pursuing for its 
own sake. Nor has the " foundation of Posi- 
tivism," we imagine, so far changed the conditions 
of human existence, that it should now be criminal 
to acquire, by observation and reasoning, a know- 
ledge of the facts of the universe, leaving to pos- 
terity to find a use for it. Even in the last two or 
three years, has not the discovery of new metals, 
which may prove important even in the practical 
arts, arisen from one of the investigations which 
M. Comte most unequivocally condemns as idle, 
the research into the internal constitution of the 
sun? How few, moreover, of the discoveries which 



174 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

have changed the face of the world, either were or 
could have heen arrived at hy investigations aim- 
ing directly at the object ! Would the mariner's 
compass ever have heen found hy direct efforts for 
the improvement of navigation ? Should we have 
reached the electric telegraph hy any amount of 
striving for a means of instantaneous communica- 
tion, if Franklin had not identified electricity with 
lightning, and Ampere with magnetism ? The 
most apparently insignificant archaeological or 
geological fact, is often found to throw a light on 
human history, which M. Comte, the basis of 
whose social philosophy is history, should be the 
last person to disparage. The direction of the 
entrance to the three great Pyramids of Ghizeh, 
by showing the position of the circumpolar stars 
at the time when they were built, is the best evi- 
dence we even now have of the immense antiquity 
of Egyptian civilization.* The one point on which 
M. Comte's doctrine has some colour of reason, is 
the case of sidereal astronomy : so little knowledge 
of it being really accessible to us, and the connex- 
ion of that little with any terrestrial interests 
being, according to all our means of judgment, 
infinitesimal. It is certainly difficult to imagine 
how any considerable benefit to humanity can be 
derived from a knowledge of the motions of the 
double stars : should these ever become important 
to us it will be in so prodigiously remote an age, 
that we can afford to remain ignorant of them 
until, at least, all our moral, political, and social 

° See Sir John Herschel's Outlines of Astronomy, § 319. 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 175 

difficulties have been settled. Yet the discovery 
that gravitation extends even to those remote 
regions, gives some additional strength to the con- 
viction of the universality of natural laws ; and 
the habitual meditation on such vast objects and 
distances is not without an aesthetic usefulness, by 
kindling and exalting the imagination, the worth 
of which in itself, and even its re-action on the 
intellect, M. Comte is quite capable of appreciat- 
ing. He would reply, however, that there are 
better means of accomplishing these purposes. In 
the same spirit he condemns the study even of the 
solar system, when extended to any planets but 
those which are' visible to the naked eye, and 
which alone exert an appreciable gravitative in- 
fluence on the earth. Even the perturbations he 
thinks it idle to study, beyond a mere general con- 
ception of them, and thinks that astronomy may 
well limit its domain to the motions and mutual 
action of the earth, sun, and moon. He looks for 
a similar expurgation of all the other sciences. 
In one passage he expressly says that the greater 
part of the researches which are really accessible 
to us are idle and useless. He would pare down 
the dimensions of all the sciences as narrowly as 
possible. He is continually repeating that no 
science, as an abstract study, should be carried 
further than is necessary to lay the foundation for 
the science next above it, and so ultimately for 
moral science, the principal purpose of them all. 
Any further extension of the mathematical and 
physical sciences should be merely "episodic;" 



176 LATEH SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

limited to what may from time to time be demand- 
ed by the requirements of industry and the arts ; 
and should be left to the industrial classes, except 
when they find it necessary to apply to the sacer- 
dotal order for some additional development of 
scientific theory. This, he evidently thinks, would 
be a rare contingency, most physical truths suffi- 
ciently concrete and real for practice being empir- 
ical. Accordingly in estimating the number of 
clergy necessary for Prance, Europe, and our en- 
tire planet (for his forethought extends thus far), 
he proportions it solely to their moral and religious 
attributions (overlooking, by the way, even their 
medical) ; and leaves nobody with any time to 
cultivate the sciences, except abortive candidates 
for the priestly office, who having been refused ad- 
mittance into it for insufficiency in moral excel- 
lence or in strength of character, may be thought 
worth retaining as "pensioners " of the sacerdotal 
order, on account of their theoretic abilities. 

It is no exaggeration to say, that M. Comte 
gradually acquired a real hatred for scientific and 
all purely intellectual pursuits, and was bent on 
retaining no more of them than was strictly indis- 
pensable. The greatest of his anxieties is lest 
people should reason, and seek to know, more than 
enough. He regards all abstraction and all reason- 
ing as morally dangerous, by developing an inordi- 
nate pride (orgueil), and still more, by producing 
dryness (s^cheresse) . Abstract thought, he says, 
is not a wholesome occupation for more than a 
small number of human beings, nor of them for 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 177 

more than a small part of their time. Art, which 
calls the emotions into play along with and more 
than the reason, is the only intellectual exercise 
really adapted to human nature. It is nevertheless 
indispensahle that the chief theories of the various 
abstract sciences, together with the modes in which 
those theories were historically and logically ar- 
rived at, should form a part of universal education : 
for, first, it is only thus that the methods can be 
learnt, by which to attain the results sought by the 
moral and social sciences : though we cannot per- 
ceive that M. Comte got at his own moral and 
social results by those processes. Secondly, the 
principal truths of the subordinate sciences are 
necessary to the systematization (still systematiza- 
tion !) of our conceptions, by binding together our 
notions of the world in a set of propositions, which 
are coherent, and are a sufficiently correct repre- 
sentation of fact for our practical wants. Thirdly, 
a familiar knowledge of the invariable laws of 
natural phenomena is a great elementary lesson of 
submission, which, he is never weary of saying, is 
the first condition both of morality and of happi- 
ness. For these reasons, he would cause to be 
taught, from the age of fourteen to that of twenty- 
one, to all persons, rich and poor, girls or youths, 
a knowledge of the whole series of abstract sciences, 
such as none but the most highly instructed per- 
sons now possess, and of a far more systematic and 
philosophical character than is usually possessed 
even by them. (N.B. — They are to learn, during 
the same years, Greek and Latin, having previous- 

12 



178 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

ly, between the ages of seven and fourteen, learnt 
the five principal modern languages, to the degree 
necessary for reading, with due appreciation, the 
chief poetical compositions in each.) But they are 
to be taught all this, not only without encouraging, 
but stifling as much as possible, the examining and 
questioning spirit. The disposition which should 
be encouraged is that of receiving all on the au- 
thority of the teacher. The Positivist faith, e^en 
in its scientific part, is la foi demontrable, but ought 
by no means to be la foi toujour s demontree. The 
pupils have no business to be over-solicitous about 
proof. The teacher should not even present the 
proofs to them in a complete form, or as proofs. 
The object of instruction is to make them under- 
stand the doctrines themselves, perceive their 
mutual connexion, and form by means of them a 
consistent and systematized conception of nature. 
As for the demonstrations, it is rather desirable 
than otherwise that even theorists should forget 
them, retaining only the results. Among all the 
aberrations of scientific men, M. Comte thinks 
none greater than the pedantic anxiety they show 
for complete proof, and perfect rationalization of 
scientific processes. It ought to be enough that 
the doctrines afford an explanation of phenomena, 
consistent with itself and with known facts, and 
that the processes are justified by their fruits. This 
over-anxiety for proof, he complains, is breaking 
down, by vain scruples, the knowledge which 
seemed to have been attained ; witness the present 
state of chemistry. The demand of proof for what 



LATER SPECULATIONS OP M. COMTE. 179 

has been accepted by Humanity, is itself a mark of 
" distrust, if not hostility, to the sacerdotal order " 
(the naivete of this would be charming, if it were 
not deplorable), and is a revolt against the tradi- 
tions of the human race. So early had the new 
High Priest adopted the feelings and taken up the 
inheritance of the old. One of his favourite aphor- 
isms is the strange one, that the living are more 
and more governed by the dead. As is not un- 
common with him, he introduces the dictum in 
one sense, and uses it in another. What he at first 
means by it, is that as civilization advances, the 
sum of our possessions, physical and intellectual, 
is due in a decreasing proportion to ourselves, and 
in an increasing one to our progenitors. The use 
he makes of it is, that we should submit ourselves 
more and more implicitly to the authority of pre- 
vious generations, and suffer ourselves less and less 
to doubt their judgment, or test by our own reason 
the grounds of their opinions. The unwillingness 
of the human intellect and conscience, in their 
present state of " anarchy," to sign their own ab- 
dication, he calls "the insurrection of the living 
against the dead." To this complexion has Positive 
Philosophy come at last I 

Worse, however, remains to be told. M. Comte 
selects a hundred volumes of science, philosophy, 
poetry, history, and general knowledge, which he 
deems a sufficient library for every positivist, even 
of the theoretic order, and actually proposes a 
systematic holocaust of books in general — it would 
almost seem of all books except these. Even that 

12 * 



180 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

to which he shows most indulgence, poetry, except 
the very best, is to undergo a similar fate, with the 
reservation of select passages, on the ground that, 
poetry being intended to cultivate our instinct of 
ideal perfection, any kind of it that is less than the 
best is worse than none. This imitation of the 
error, we will call it the crime, of the early Chris- 
tians—and in an exaggerated form, for even they 
destroyed only those writings of pagans or heretics 
which were directed against themselves — is the 
one thing in M. Comte's projects which merits 
real indignation. When once M. Comte has de- 
cided, all evidence on the other side, nay, the very 
historical evidence on which he grounded his de- 
cision, had better perish. When mankind have 
enlisted under his banner, they must burn their 
ships. There is, though in a less offensive form, 
the same overweening presumption in a suggestion 
he makes, that all species of animals and plants 
which are useless to man should be systematically 
rooted out. As if any one could presume to assert 
that the smallest weed may not, as knowledge ad- 
vances, be found to have some property serviceable 
to man. When we consider that the united power 
of the whole human race cannot reproduce a 
species once eradicated — that what is once done, 
in the extirpation of races, can never be repaired ; 
one can only be thankful that amidst all which the 
past rulers of mankind have to answer for, they 
have never come up to the measure of the great 
regenerator of Humanity ; mankind have not yet 
been under the rule of one who assumes that he 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 181 

knows all there is to be known, and that when he 
has put himself at the head of humanity, the book 
of human knowledge may be closed. 

Of course M. Gomte does not make this as- 
sumption consistently. He does not imagine that 
he actually possesses all knowledge, but only that 
he is an infallible judge what knowledge is worth 
possessing. He does not believe that mankind have 
reached in all directions the extreme limits of use- 
ful and laudable scientific inquiry. He thinks 
there is a large scope for it still, in adding to our 
power over the external world, but chiefly in per- 
fecting our own physical, intellectual, and moral 
nature. He holds that all our mental strength 
should be economized, for the pursuit of this ob- 
ject in the mode leading most directly to the end. 
With this view, some one problem should always 
be selected, the solution of which would be more 
important than any other to the interests of human- 
ity, and upon this the entire intellectual resources 
of the theoretic mind should be concentrated, until 
it is either resolved, or has to be given up as in- 
soluble : after which mankind should go on to 
another, to be pursued with similar exclusiveness. 
The selection of this problem of course rests with 
the sacerdotal order, or in other words, with the 
High Priest. We should then see the whole specu- 
lative intellect of the human race simultaneously 
at work on one question, by orders from above, as 
a French minister of public instruction once 
boasted that a million of boys were saying the 
same lesson during the same half-hour in every 



182 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

town and village of Prance. The reader will be 
anxious to know, how much better and more 
wisely the human intellect will be applied under 
this absolute monarchy, and to what degree this 
system of government will be preferable to the 
present anarchy, in which every theorist does what 
is intellectually right in his own eyes. M. Comte has 
not left us in ignorance on this point. He gives us 
ample means of judging. The Pontiff of Positivism 
informs us what problem, in his opinion, should be 
selected before all others for this united pursuit. 

What this problem is, we must leave those who 
are curious on the subject to learn from the 
treatise itself. When they have done so, they will 
be qualified to form their own opinion of the 
amount of advantage which the general good of 
mankind would be likely to derive, from exchang- 
ing the present " dispersive speciality" and " in- 
tellectual anarchy" for the subordination of the 
intellect to the cceur, personified in a High Priest, 
prescribing a single problem for the undivided 
study of the theoretic mind. 

We have given a sufficient general idea of M. 
Comte' s plan for the regeneration of human 
society, by putting an end to anarchy, and " sys- 
tematizing " human thought and conduct under 
the direction of feeling. But an adequate con- 
ception will not have been formed of the height of 
his self-confidence, until something more has been 
told. Be it known, then, that M. Comte by no 
means proposes this new constitution of society for 
realization in the remote future. A complete plan 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 183 

of measures of transition is ready prepared, and lie 
determines the year, before the end of the present 
century, in which the new spiritual and temporal 
powers will be installed, and the regime of our 
maturity will begin. He did not indeed calculate 
on converting to Positivism, within that time, 
more than a thousandth part of all the heads of 
families in Western Europe and its offshoots be- 
yond the Atlantic. But he fixes the time necessary 
for the complete political establishment of Posi- 
tivism at thirty-three years, divided into three 
periods, of seven, five, and twenty-one years re- 
spectively. At the expiration of seven, the direc- 
tion of public education in Prance would be placed 
in M. Comte's hands. In ^.ye years more, the 
Emperor Napoleon, or his successor, will resign 
his power to a provisional triumvirate, composed 
of three eminent proletaires of the positivist faith ; 
for proletaires, though not fit for permanent rule ? 
are the best agents of the transition, being the 
most free from the prejudices which are the chief 
obstacle to it. These rulers will employ the re- 
maining twenty-one years in preparing society for 
its final constitution ; and after duly installing the 
Spiritual Power, and effecting the decomposition of 
Prance into the seventeen republics before men- 
tioned, will give over the temporal government of 
each to the normal dictatorship of the three 
bankers. A man may be deemed happy, but 
scarcely modest, who had such boundless con- 
fidence in his own powers of foresight, and ex- 
pected so complete a triumph of his own ideas on 



184 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

the reconstitution of society within the possible 
limits of his lifetime. If he could live (he said) to 
the age of Fontenelle, or of Hobbes, or even of 
Voltaire, he should see all this realized, or as good 
as realized. He died, however, at sixty, without 
leaving any disciple sufficiently advanced to be ap- 
pointed his successor. There is now a College, and 
a Director, of Positivism ; but Humanity no longer 
possesses a High Priest. 

What more remains to be said may be de- 
spatched more summarily. Its interest is philo- 
sophic rather than practical. In his four volumes 
of " Politique Positive," M. Comte revises and re- 
elaborates the scientific and historical expositions 
of his first treatise. His object is to systematize 
(again to systematize) knowledge from the human 
or subjective point of view, the only one, he con- 
tends, from which a real synthesis is possible. For 
(he says) the knowledge attainable by us of the 
laws of the universe is at best fragmentary, and 
incapable of reduction to a real unity. An ob- 
jective synthesis, the dream of Descartes and the 
best thinkers of old, is impossible. The laws of 
the real world are too numerous, and the manner 
of their working into one another too intricate, to 
be, as a general rule, correctly traced and repre- 
sented by our reason. The only connecting prin- 
ciple in our knowledge is its relation to our wants, 
and it is upon that we must found our systematiza- 
tion. The answer to this is, first, that there is no 
necessity for an universal synthesis ; and secondly, 
that the same arguments may be used against the 



LATER SPECULATIONS OP M. COMTE. 185 

possibility of a complete subjective, as of a complete 
objective systematization. A subjective synthesis 
must consist in the arrangement and co-ordination 
of all useful knowledge, on the basis of its relation 
to human wants and interests. But those wants 
and interests are, like the laws of the universe, 
extremely multifarious, and the order of preference 
among them in all their different gradations (for it 
varies according to the degree of each) cannot be 
cast into precise general propositions. M. Comte's 
subjective synthesis consists only in eliminating 
from the sciences everything that he deems useless, 
and presenting as far as possible every theoretical 
investigation as the solution of a practical problem. 
To this, however, he cannot consistently adhere; 
for, in every science, the theoretic truths are much 
more closely connected with one another than with 
the human purposes which they eventually serve, 
and can only be made to cohere in the intellect by 
being, to a great degree, presented as if they were 
truths of pure reason, irrespective of any practical 
application. 

There are many things eminently characteristic 
of M. Comte's second career, in this revision of the 
results of his first. Under the head of Biology, 
and for the better combination of that science with 
Sociology and Ethics, he found that he required a 
new system of Phrenology, being justly dissatisfied 
with that of Gall and his successors. Accordingly 
he set about constructing one a priori, grounded on 
the best enumeration and classification he could 
make of the elementary faculties of our intellectual, 



186 LATER SPECULATIONS OP M. COMTE. 

moral, and animal nature ; to each of which he 
assigned an hypothetical place in the skull, the 
most conformahle that he could to the few positive 
facts on the subject which he considered as estab- 
lished, and to the general presumption that func- 
tions which react strongly on one another must 
have their organs adjacent : leaving the localities 
avowedly to be hereafter verified, by anatomical 
and inductive investigation. There is considerable 
merit in this attempt, though it is liable to obvious 
criticisms, of the same nature as his own upon 
Gall. But the characteristic thing is, that while 
presenting all this as hypothesis waiting for verifi- 
cation, he could not have taken its truth more 
completely for granted if the verification had been 
made. In all that he afterwards wrote, every 
detail of his theory of the brain is as unhesitatingly 
asserted, and as confidently built upon, as any 
other doctrine of science. This is his first great 
attempt in the "Subjective Method," which, origin- 
ally meaning only the subordination of the pursuit 
of truth to human uses, had already come to mean 
drawing truth itself from the fountain of his own 
mind. He had become, on the one hand, almost 
indifferent to proof, provided he attained theoretic 
coherency, and on the other, serenely confident that 
even the guesses which originated with himself 
could not but come out true. 

There is one point in his later view of the 
sciences, which appears to us a decided improve- 
ment on his earlier. He adds to the six funda- 
mental sciences of his original scale, a seventh 



LATEE, SPECULATIONS OE M. COMTE. 187 

under the name of Morals, . forming the highest 
step of the ladder, immediately after Sociology : 
remarking that it might, with still greater pro- 
priety, be termed Anthropology, being the science 
of individual human nature, a study, when rightly 
understood, more special and complicated than 
even that of Society. For it is obliged to take 
into consideration the diversities of constitution 
and temperament (la reaction cer^brale des visceres 
veg^tatifs) the effects of which, still very imper- 
fectly understood, are highly important in the 
individual, but in the theory of society may be 
neglected, because, differing in different persons, 
they neutralize one another on the large scale. 
This is a remark worthy of M. Comte in his best 
days ; and the science thus conceived is, as he 
says, the true scientific foundation of the art of 
Morals (and indeed of the art of human life), 
which, therefore, may, both philosophically and 
didactically, be properly combined with it. 

His philosophy of general history is recast, and 
in many respects changed; we cannot but say, 
greatly for the worse. He gives much greater 
development than before to the Fetishistic, and to 
what he terms the Theocratic, periods. To the 
Fetishistic view of nature he evinces a partiality, 
which appears strange in a Positive philosopher. 
But the reason is that Fetish-worship is a religion 
of the feelings, and not at all of the intelligence. 
He regards it as cultivating universal love : as a 
practical fact it cultivates much rather universal 
fear. He looks upon Fetishism as much more akin 



188 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

to Positivism than any of the forms of Theology, 
inasmuch as these consider matter as inert, and 
moved only by forces, natural and supernatural, 
exterior to itself : while Eetishism resembles 
Positivism in conceiving matter as spontaneously 
active, and errs only by not distinguishing activity 
from life. As if the superstition of the Fetishist 
consisted only in believing that the objects which 
produce the phaenomena of nature involuntarily, 
produce them voluntarily. The Fetishist thinks 
not merely that his Fetish is alive, but that it can 
help him in war, can cure him of diseases, can 
grant him prosperity, or afflict him with all the 
contrary evils. Therein consists the lamentable 
effect of Fetishism — its degrading and prostrating 
influence on the feelings and conduct, its conflict 
with all genuine experience, and antagonism to all 
real knowledge of nature. 

M. Comte had also no small sympathy with 
the Oriental theocracies, as he calls the sacerdotal 
castes, who indeed often deserved it by their early 
services to intellect and civilization ; by the aid 
they gave to the establishment of regular govern- 
ment, the valuable though empirical knowledge 
they accumulated, and the height to which they 
helped to carry some of the useful arts. M. Comte 
admits that they became oppressive, and that the 
prolongation of their ascendancy came to be in- 
compatible with further improvement. But he 
ascribes this to their having arrogated to them- 
selves the temporal government, which, so far as 
we have any authentic information, they never 



LATER SPECULATIONS OE M. COMTE. 180 

did. The reason why the sacerdotal corporations 
became oppressive, was becanse they were or- 
ganized : because they attempted the " unity " 
and " systematization " so dear to M. Comte, and 
allowed no science and no speculation, except with 
their leave and under their direction. M. Comte's 
sacerdotal order, which, in his system, has all the 
power that ever they had, would be oppressive in 
the same manner ; with no variation but that 
which arises from the altered state of society and 
of the human mind. 

M. Comte's partiality to the theocracies is 
strikingly contrasted with his dislike of the Greeks, 
whom as a people he thoroughly detests, for their 
undue addiction to intellectual speculation, and 
considers to have been, by an inevitable fatality, 
morally sacrificed to the formation of a few great 
scientific intellects, — principally Aristotle, Archi- 
medes, Apollonius, and Hipparchus. Any one who 
knows Grecian history as it can now be known, 
will be amazed at M. Comte's travestie of it, in 
which the vulgar est historical prejudices are 
accepted and exaggerated, to illustrate the mis- 
chiefs of intellectual culture left to its own 
guidance. 

There is no need to analyze further M. Comte's 
second view of universal history. The best chapter 
is that on the Homans, to whom, because they 
were greater in practice than in theory, and for 
centuries worked together in obedience to a social 
sentiment (though only that of their country's 
aggrandizement), M. Comte is as favourably af- 



190 LATER SPECULATIONS OP M. COMTE. 

fected, as he is inimical to all but a small selection 
of eminent thinkers among the Greeks. The 
greatest blemish in this chapter is the idolatry of 
Julius Caesar, whom M. Comte regards as one of 
the most illustrious characters in history, and of 
the greatest practical benefactors of mankind. 
Caesar had many eminent qualities, but what he 
did to deserve such praise we are at a loss to 
discover, except subverting a free government : 
that merit, however, with M. Comte, goes a great 
way. It did not, in his former days, suffice to 
rehabilitate Napoleon, whose name and memory he 
regarded with a bitterness highly honourable to 
himself, and whose career he deemed one of the 
greatest calamities in modern history. But in his 
later writings these sentiments are considerably 
mitigated : he regards Napoleon as a more estimable 
" dictator " than Louis Philippe, and thinks that 
his greatest error was re-establishing the Academy 
of Sciences ! That this should be said by M. 
Comte, and said of Napoleon, measures the depth 
to which his moral standard had fallen. 

The last volume which he published, that on 
the Philosophy of Mathematics, is in some respects 
a still sadder picture of intellectual degeneracy 
than those which preceded it. After the admirable 
resume* of the subject in the first volume of his 
first great work, we expected something of the 
very highest order when he returned to the subject 
for a more thorough treatment of it. But, being 
the commencement of a Synthese Subjective, it 
contains, as might be expected, a great deal that is 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 101 

much more subjective than mathematical. Nor of 
this do we complain : but we little imagined of 
what nature this subjective matter was to be. M. 
Comte here joins together the two ideas, which, of 
all that he has put forth, are the most repugnant 
to the fundamental principles of Positive Philo- 
sophy. One of them is that on which Ave have just 
commented, the assimilation between Positivism 
and Petishisrti. The other, of which we took notice 
in a former article, was the f< liberte facultative " of 
shaping our scientific conceptions to gratify the 
demands not solely of objective truth, but of intel- 
lectual and a?sthetic suitability. It would be an 
excellent thing, M. Comte thinks, if science could 
be deprived of its sec/ieresse, and directly associated 
with sentiment. Now it is impossible to prove 
that the external world, and the bodies composing 
it, are not endowed with feeling, and voluntary 
agency. It is therefore highly desirable that we 
should educate ourselves into imagining that they 
are. Intelligence it will not do to invest them 
with, for some distinction must be maintained 
between simple activity and life. But we may 
suppose that they feel what is done to them, and 
desire and will what they themselves do. Even 
intelligence, which we must deny to them in the 
present, may be attributed to them in the past. 
Before man existed, the earth, at that time an 
intelligent being, may have exerted " its physico- 
chemical activity so as to improve the astronomical 
order by changing its principal coefficients. Our 
planet may be supposed to have rendered its orbit 



192 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

less excentric, and thereby more habitable, by 
planning a long series of explosions, analogous to 
those from which, according to the best hypotheses, 
comets proceed. Judiciously reproduced, similar 
shocks may have rendered the inclination of the 
earth's axis better adapted to the future wants of 
the Grand Etre. A fortiori the Earth may have 
modified its own figure, which is only beyond our 
intervention because our spiritual ascendancy has 
not at its disposal a sufficient material force." 
The like may be conceived as having been done by 
each of the other planets, in concert, possibly, with 
the Earth and with one another. " In proportion 
as each planet improved its own condition, its life 
exhausted itself by excess of innervation ; but with 
the consolation of rendering its self-devotion more 
efficacious, when the extinction of its special 
functions, first animal, and finally vegetative, 
reduced it to the universal attributes of feeling 
and activity."* This stuff, though he calls it 
fiction, he soon after speaks of as belief (croyance), 
to be greatly recommended, as at once satisfying 
our natural curiosity, and " perfecting our unity " 
(again unity !) " by supplying the gaps in our scien- 
tific notions with poetic fictions, and developing 
sympathetic emotions and aesthetic inspirations : 
the world being conceived as aspiring to second 
mankind in ameliorating the universal order under 
the impulse of the Grand Etre." And he obviously 
intends that we should be trained to make these 
fantastical inventions permeate all our associations, 

* Synthese Subjective, pp. 10, 11. 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 193 

until we are incapable of conceiving the world and 
Nature apart from them, and they become equiva- 
lent to, and are in fact transformed into, real beliefs. 

Wretched as this is, it is singularly character- 
istic of M. Comte's later mode of thought. A 
writer might be excused for introducing into an 
avowed work of fancy this dance of the planets, 
and conception of an animated Earth. If finely 
executed, he might even be admired for it. No 
one blames a poet for ascribing feelings, purposes, 
and human propensities to flowers. Because a con- 
ception might be interesting, and perhaps edifying, 
in a poem, M. Comte would have it imprinted on 
the inmost texture of every human mind in ordin- 
ary prose. If the imagination were not taught its 
prescribed lesson equally with the reason, where 
would be Unity ? " It is important that the 
domain of fiction should become as systematic as 
that of demonstration, in order that their mutual 
harmony may be conformable to their respective 
destinations, both equally directed towards the 
continual increase of unity, personal and social."* 

Nor is it enough to have created the Grand 
Fetiche (so he actually proposes to call the Earth), 
and to be able to include it and all concrete ex- 
istence in our adoration along with the Grand Etre. 
It is necessary also to extend Positivist Eetishism 
'to purely abstract existence ; to " animate " the 
laws as well as the facts of nature. It is not 
sufficient to have made physics sentimental, mathe- 
matics must be made so too. This does not at first 

* Synthese Subjective, pp. 11, 12. 
13 



191 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

seem easy ; but M. Comte finds the nieaiis of ac- 
complishing it. His plan is, to make Space also 
an object of adoration, under the name of the 
Grand Milieu, and consider it as the representative 
of Fatality in general. " The final unity disposes 
us to cultivate sympathy by developing our grati- 
tude to whatever serves the Grand Etre. It must 
dispose us to venerate the Eatality on which re- 
poses the whole aggregate of our existence." We 
should conceive this Natality as having a fixed 
seat, and that seat must be considered to be Space, 
which should be conceived as possessing feeling, 
but not activity or intelligence. And in our ab- 
stract speculations we should imagine all our con- 
ceptions as located in free Space. Our images of 
all sorts, down to our geometrical diagrams, and 
even our ciphers and algebraic symbols, should 
always be figured to ourselves as written in space, 
and not on paper or any other material substance. 
M. Comte adds that they should be conceived as 
green on a white ground. 

"We cannot go on any longer with this. In 
spite of it all, the volume on mathematics is full of 
profound thoughts, and will be very suggestive to 
those who take up the subject after M. Comte. 
What deep meaning there is, for example, in the 
idea that the infinitesimal calculus is a conception 
analogous to the corpuscular hypothesis in physics ; 
which last M. Comte has always considered as a 
logical artifice ; not an opinion respecting matters 
of fact. The assimilation, as it seems to us, throws 
a flood of light on both conceptions ; on the physi- 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 195 

cal one still more than the mathematical. We 
might extract many ideas of similar, though none 
perhaps of equal, suggestiveness. But mixed with 
these, what pitiable niaiseries ! One of his great 
points is the importance of the " moral and in- 
tellectual properties of numbers." He cultivates a 
superstitious reverence for some of them. The first 
three are sacred, les nombres sacre's : One being the 
type of all Synthesis, Two of all Combination, 
which he now says is always binary (in his first 
treatise he only said that we may usefully repre- 
sent it to ourselves as being so), and Three of all 
Progression, which not only requires three terms, 
but as he now maintains, never ought to have any 
more. To these sacred numbers all our mental 
operations must be made, as far as possible, to ad- 
just themselves. Next to them, he has a great 
partiality for the number seven ; for these whimsi- 
cal reasons : " Composed of two progressionsfollowed 
by a synthesis, or of one progression between two 
couples, the number seven, coming next after the 
sum of the three sacred numbers, determines the 
largest group which we can distinctly imagine. 
Reciprocally, it marks the limit of the divisions 
which we can directly conceive in a magnitude of 
any kind." The number seven, therefore, must be 
foisted in wherever possible, and among other 
things, is to be made the basis of numeration, 
which is hereafter to be septimal instead of de- 
cimal : producing all the inconvenience of a 
change of system, not only without getting rid of, 
but greatly aggravating, the disadvantages of the 

13 * 



196 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

existing one. But then, he says, it is absolutely 

necessary that the basis of numeration should be a 

prime number. All other people think it absolutely 

necessary that it should not, and regard the present 

basis as only objectionable in not being divisible 

enough. But M. Comte's puerile predilection for 

prime numbers almost passes belief. His reason is 

that they are the type of irreductibility : each of 

them is a kind of ultimate arithmetical fact. This, 

to any one who knows M. Comte in his later 

aspects, is amply sufficient. Nothing can exceed 

his delight in anything which says to the human 

mind, Thus far shalt thou go and no farther. Il 

prime numbers are precious, doubly prime numbers 

are doubly so ; meaning those which are not only 

themselves prime numbers, but the number which 

marks their place in the series of prime numbers is 

a prime number. Still greater is the dignity of 

trebly prime numbers ; when the number marking 

the place of this second number is also prime. The 

number thirteen fulfils these conditions : it is a 

prime number, it is the seventh prime number, and 

seven is the fifth prime number. Accordingly he 

has an outrageous partiality to the number thirteen. 

Though one of the most inconvenient of all small 

numbers, he insists on introducing it everywhere. 

These strange conceits are connected with a 
highly characteristic example of M. Comte's frenzy 
for regulation. He cannot bear that anything 
should be left unregulated : there ought to be no 
such thing as hesitation ; nothing should remain 
arbitrary, for VarUtraire is always favourable to 



LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 197 

egoism. Submission to artificial prescriptions is as 
indispensable as to natural laws, and he boasts 
that under the reign of sentiment, human life may 
be made equally, and even more, regular than the 
courses of the stars. But the great instrument of 
exact regulation for the details of life is numbers : 
fixed numbers, therefore, should be introduced into 
all our conduct. M. Comte's first application of 
this system was to the correction of his own 
literary style. Complaint had been made, not un- 
deservedly, that in his first great work, especially 
in the latter part of it, the sentences and paragraphs 
were long, clumsy, and involved. To correct this 
fault, of which he was aware, he imposed on him- 
self the following rules. No sentence was to exceed 
two lines of his manuscript, equivalent to five of 
print. No paragraph was to consist of more than 
seven sentences. He further applied to his prose 
writing the rule of Prench versification which for- 
bids a hiatus (the concourse of two vowels), not 
allowing it to himself even at the break between 
two sentences or two paragraphs ; nor did he per- 
mit himself ever to use the same word twice, 
either in the same sentence or in two consecutive 
sentences, though belonging to different para- 
graphs : with the exception of the monosyllabic 
auxiliaries.* All this is well enough, especially 
the first two precepts, and a good way of breaking 
through a bad habit. But M. Comte persuaded 
himself that any arbitrary restriction, though in no 

* Preface to the fourth volume of the " Systeine de Politique 
Positive." 



198 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

way emanating from, and therefore necessarily dis- 
turbing, the natural order and proportion of the 
thoughts, is a benefit in itself, and tends to im. 
prove style. If it renders composition vastly more 
difficult, he rejoices at it, as tending to confine 
writing to superior minds. Accordingly, in the 
Synthase Subjective, he institutes the following 
" plan for all compositions of importance." " Every 
volume really capable of forming a distinct treatise" 
should consist of " seven chapters, besides the in- 
troduction and the conclusion ; and each of these 
should be composed of three parts." Each third 
part of a chapter should be divided into " seven 
sections, each composed of seven groups of sen- 
tences, separated by the usual break of line. Nor- 
mally formed, the section offers a central group of 
seven sentences, preceded and followed by three 
groups of five : the first section of each part re- 
duces to three sentences three of its groups, 
symmetrically placed ; the last section gives seven 
sentences to each of its extreme groups. These 
rules of composition make prose approach to the 
regularity of poetry, when combined with my pre- 
vious reduction of the maximum length of a sen- 
tence to two manuscript or five printed lines, that 
is, 250 letters." " Normally constructed, great 
poems consist of thirteen cantos, decomposed into 
parts, sections, and groups like my chapters, sav- 
ing the complete equality of the groups and of the 
sections." " This difference of structure between 
volumes of poetry and of philosophy is more ap- 
parent than real, for the introduction and the con- 



LATER SPECULATIONS OE M. COMTE. 199 

elusion of a poem should comprehend six of its 
thirteen cantos," leaving, therefore, the cabalistic 
number seven for the body of the poem. And all 
this regulation not being sufficiently meaningless, 
fantastic, and oppressive, he invents an elaborate 
system for compelling each of his sections and 
groups to begin with a letter of the alphabet, de- 
termined beforehand, the letters being selected so 
as to compose words having " a synthetic or sym- 
pathetic signification," and as close a relation as 
possible to the section or part to which they are 
appropriated. 

Others may laugh, but we could far rather 
weep at this melancholy decadence of a great in- 
tellect. M. Comte used to reproach his early 
English admirers with maintaining the " con- 
spiracy of silence " concerning his later perform- 
ances. The reader can now judge whether such 
reticence is not more than sufficiently explained 
by tenderness for his fame, and a conscientious 
fear of bringing undeserved discredit on the noble 
speculations of his earlier career. 

M. Comte was accustomed to consider Des- 
cartes and Leibnitz as his principal precursors, 
and the only great philosophers (among many 
thinkers of high philosophic capacity) in modern 
times. It was to their minds that he considered 
his own to bear the nearest resemblance. Though 
we have not so lofty an opinion of any of the three 
as M. Comte had, we think the assimilation just : 
these were, of all recorded thinkers, the two who 
bore most resemblance to M. Comte. They were 



200 LATER SPECULATIONS OF M. COMTE. 

like him in earnestness, like him, though scarcely 
equal to him, in confidence in themselves; they 
had the same extraordinary power of concatena- 
tion and co-ordination ; they enriched human 
knowledge with great truths and great concep- 
tions of method ; they were, of all great scientific 
thinkers, the most consistent, and for that reason 
often the most absurd, because they shrank from 
no consequences, however contrary to common 
sense, to which their premises appeared to lead. 
Accordingly their names have come down to us 
associated with grand thoughts, with most import- 
ant discoveries, and also with some of the most 
extravagantly wild and ludicrously absurd concep- 
tions and theories which ever were solemnly pro- 
pounded by thoughtful men. We think M. Comte 
as great as either of these philosophers, and hardly 
more extravagant. Were we to speak our whole 
mind, we should call him superior to them : 
though not intrinsically, yet by the exertion of 
equal intellectual power in a more advanced state 
of human preparation ; but also in an age less 
tolerant of palpable absurdities, and to which those 
he has committed, if not in themselves greater, at 
least appear more ridiculous. 



THE END. 



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